


bombs, brassieres, and 101 reasons not to love a time lord

by muffinsinblueberries



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Cunnilingus, Esoteric masturbation, F/F, F/M, Plot, also Inventive Similes, and Canon-Typical Genocide, and the doctor has an ass, basically yaz is a smartass, but above all, enjoy xx, p.s. i wasn't kidding about that plot tag, that they both want to tap, that's the whole fic, the master is just an ass, this is going to get wacky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-21 00:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30013212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muffinsinblueberries/pseuds/muffinsinblueberries
Summary: To her never-ending chagrin, Yaz discovers that she's not theonlyperson obsessed with the Doctor. Luckily for her, though, O is a nice guy. It's not like running away with him will put Yaz in danger or accelerate the heat death of the universe or anything. Right?(In which Yaz and the Master are unlikelyfriendsrivalsloversallieswho team up to conquer the universe, seduce the Doctor, and maybe even destroy Gallifrey a few more times for good measure. As long as they take care to stay away from any mysterious jewelry or potentially evil future versions of themselves, what could possibly go wrong?)
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan, Yasmin Khan/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	1. i've got a feeling that you brought me to you (yeah you did, babe)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! So I can't lie, this fic was totally inspired by the New Years' special. I mean, did anyone else see Yaz's whole obsessive shrine to the Doctor? I started writing it then, but as it turns out, ao3 invitations take a long time to arrive... Anyway, this was a labour of love for me, and I'm so glad you're reading it!
> 
> ps. CONTENT/TRIGGER notes :)
> 
> \- there isn't too much sex in this fic, but all of it is consensual, nonviolent, and nice. However, the romance is going to get pretty toxic at some points, so be aware of that. Also there will be one kiss which I wanna say might have questionable consent.  
> \- the Master is very manipulative ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ no surprise there. Don't worry though, Yaz will get him back with a vengeance.  
> \- there's not too much gore or violence. I'll warn you in chapter notes if that stuff crops up.  
> \- this chapter has a short mention of human trafficking (in the context of it being a problem that Yaz wants to crack down on as a police officer.)
> 
> Enjoy!

They get split off from the rest of the group. Maybe that’s where the trouble begins. It’s an ambush-- Yaz figures that out soon enough (too late)-- but she never really knows the Master well enough to say whether he’d planned it all along. 

Is it something she says? She says a lot to him. Maybe too much. 

Like when she asks him about those files in his kitchen that he’s been keeping on the Doctor for years: pictures and drawings and newspaper clippings, which he’s arranged chronologically with meticulous and loving precision. You know, like a goddamn stalker. He laughs then, light as you please, as though it’s all some sort of grand joke. They’re busy running from Barton anyway, just the two of them. O and Yaz, Yaz and O. She doesn’t hate it. It’s them against the Kassavin now, and it’ll be them against the universe someday, and she doesn’t hate that either. But she wonders, later. 

Did he know, then? Could he know that Yaz wanted to get her hands on those files so badly she was going mad a little, inside? 

Maybe he did, just like a part of her has always known: Looking at him and seeing her own eyes reflected back in his, and again and again, a feedback loop just like the kind the Doctor is always…

Well, she’s more than a little mad now. 

On second thought, maybe it begins a long time ago. Began? Since Yaz changed, she’s been having trouble, now, with time. Everything has been a jumble. She supposes it’s her fault, for not wanting to be like the rest, for wanting to be special, for wanting _her._ Perversion of nature always has consequences, doesn’t it. Even the Doctor had said as much. 

She wishes she’d listened. 

Promises made, promises kept. She tried to make a god love her. It had even worked, though not in the way she wanted it to. 

Except that’s wrong. There’s no god now. Or maybe Yasmin is God. She could give herself that name, she supposes. She could give herself any name she wants. A fun little pseudonym to hide behind, to shield from view all the atrocities she’s committed. Isn’t that what _they’ve_ done? 

Yasmin wishes she were God. God wishes she were Yasmin. 

Oh. She remembers where it began, now. Not with the Master. Or the Doctor. 

She thought she’d have to choose. But maybe she doesn’t want either of them. Not anymore. For too long, the universe has belonged to them. 

They don’t want it, not really. And it doesn’t need them. 

The Doctor doesn’t realize that yet. Neither does the Master. 

In time, they’ll understand. For now, however, that’s where it all begins. With Yaz, of course. How could it otherwise? She is Yasmin Khan and this story belongs to her. 

//

Past, present, future. She detangles them. If Yaz concentrates, she thinks she can keep them sorted (for now). 

Now it’s the past. Or, present. Present past? 

Regardless. They’re at Barton’s party. 

Yaz is stunning in her sequined black suit and she knows it. She didn’t miss the way the Doctor’s eyes lingered on her earlier, when she emerged from the deep recesses of the TARDIS wardrobe. Not that Yaz needed the confirmation, or that she put much stock into these things anyway. It was more about the feeling she got, watching herself in the full length mirror. The formidability of it. And if she was being honest, she let her own eyes linger too, imagining herself with a gleaming badge pinned above her breast. It would be silver, burnished with her name below the words Chief of Police. The clasp silver also, a little irritating against her skin, underneath her lapel, but worth it, _so_ worth it. 

She blinked, realizing that she’d unconsciously moved to scratch at a phantom itch above her heart. 

Then the Doctor’s voice had called from the console room. Ever obedient, she’d heeled. 

All this to say, anyway, that Yaz isn’t surprised when O seems rather taken with her. He’s glued to her side the entire party. Well, except when he leaves to refill her glass of water. (Five times!) 

She wonders if she should be concerned. A hobbyist stalker displaying an interest in you is fishy enough under normal circumstances, but when he’s also a supergenius (debatably) and an accomplished spy with the ability to hack into any computer mainframe on the planet… 

On the other hand, he seems to be well acquainted with the Doctor. He’s not bad-looking either. And he _does_ have those files. 

Okay, well, it’s mostly for the files’ sake that she allows him to so unabashedly dote on her. There’s also a deep seated, _petty_ little part of her that wants the Doctor to witness them together. To be jealous. 

It’s irrational. Realistically, she knows that the timelady will not care one little iota, even if Yaz kisses O in front of her. It’s how she survives, though, these little mind games in which Yaz is all at once the winner, loser, and unwilling spectator. Because she _wants,_ harder than she’s ever wanted anything, the one thing in the universe which she can’t ever, ever have. So she gives herself little doses of make-believe to keep herself sane. Like methadone. 

How romantic. 

She turns to O, who looks like a besotted puppy in a way that is more suspicious than cute. He’s too dopey to be a spy, she thinks. She would have done a better job. Wouldn’t have gotten fired like an idiot. 

Oh, _honestly,_ what the fuck is getting into her lately? She snatches the drink he’s offering, downs half of it in one gulp. 

“So,” she tells him. 

“So.” 

Trying to keep her voice relatively free of her usual borderline fanaticism on the subject, she asks him how long he’s known the Doctor. 

He smiles. Knowingly. She looks away. 

“Many, _many_ years,” he tells her. 

Right. She’s looking for specifics. 

“How many?” she asks him lightly. 

Eyes narrowing, he studies her for a few moments. Actually-- she wonders why it doesn’t disquiet her more. Maybe because she doubts that he’ll find anything he doesn’t already know. She had him figured at first glance. It probably goes both ways. 

Finally he says, “I’ll tell you. Later.” 

Yaz nods. “Is that the truth?” 

“I haven’t lied yet. Well. Not to you,” replies O, and then, before she has the chance to follow up on whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, he extends a hand. “Dance with me.” 

She lets him guide her out onto the floor. A new song begins playing then, and it makes her laugh. 

“Radiohead,” she mouths. 

His hands are startlingly cold as they come to rest at her waist, even through the fabric of her shirt. She jolts. 

“Sorry,” he says, trying sincerely to sound like he means it. It doesn’t quite land.

Biting back a snarky response, she pushes him away. “I’ll lead.” 

“I don’t take orders,” says O, but he’s smiling. 

“Well, maybe you do now,” Yaz tells him. She grabs him about the waist. 

Giving in, he hooks his arms over her shoulders. “I get it,” he tells her. “You want to have control. You don’t care if it hurts.” 

“Shut _up!”_ exclaims Yaz, secretly pleased. “I thought you didn’t know this song.” 

O shakes his head. “Everyone knows this song, Yasmin.” 

“Well, you were off-rhythm,” she tells him. She doesn’t say _Yaz to my friends._ Anyway, there’s something more important, something more she’d like to know, now that she’s gotten him here away from the rest of the party. But first… “What do you think the Doctor is doing right now?” she asks, because she can’t help it. 

He stops swaying with the music. Stares at her, looking vaguely disappointed. “Don’t you ever think of anything besides the Doctor?” he says. “What, I’m not entertaining enough for you, by myself?” 

Yaz blinks. “Seriously?” 

They stare at each other for a full four seconds before he bursts out laughing. 

“I’m kidding, obviously. I’ve been watching her the whole night. Right now she’s out on the balcony, talking to Barton.” 

Yaz struggles not to smile, feeling both deeply dirty and somehow vindicated at the way this conversation is progressing. 

“Creep.” 

“That is the song,” he says, shrugging. When he shrugs, his hands slip off her shoulders, and then a moment later he’s leading the dance. She sighs and lets him. What a strange man. 

“Did you--“ and this is what she really wants to know, but she’s careful with phrasing, so she doesn’t offend him-- “did you, er, find the life of a spy not to your liking?” 

O twirls her and she huffs in protest. “You know I got fired,” he says evenly. 

“Fine,” she concedes. “But why?” 

“MI6 and I had our… differences.” 

“And you moved to the Outback. So they couldn’t extradite you, I assume? Did you commit treason or a war crime or something?” 

“I wanted more than they could offer.” 

She rolls her eyes. “More than MI6? Where you could keep an eye on anyone on Earth? Oh, shut up, I know that’s all you care about.” 

“She’s not on Earth a lot these days,” he says as though it’s obvious. “Besides… I had other plans.” 

“What, did you want to be prime minister too or something?” 

“What’s it to you if I did?” 

Yaz looks at him, unimpressed. Honestly, she can think of few people she would not vote for over him if forced to make the choice. That list includes Tim Shaw and every prime minister that Britain has had in her lifetime. It’s a short list. 

Nothing personal, of course. But, you know, he’s a desert recluse who spends his free time compiling data on the woman _she_ loves. Not that Yaz has a monopoly on being obsessed with the Doctor. That would be unfair. 

...Is it just her or did O kind of gloss over that war crime question? 

Just then, the Doctor runs up to them, panting. 

“I may have gotten Barton a teensy bit angry,” she says, all at once. “ _Well,_ maybe more than a teensy. Maybe more like a… never mind, no time, I’ll get Ryan and Graham. The two of you just _run!”_

After so long traveling with the Doctor, Yaz doesn’t need further encouragement. She’s out the door before she even remembers to draw her next breath, making a beeline for the motorcycles in front of the villa. She’s not exactly a skilled motorcycle racer, but police vehicle academy does have its perks, so she mounts one of them as quickly as she can and finds to her delight that the keys are in the ignition. 

She swivels in the seat, looking for the others. There’s O about three meters away, gasping as he struggles to reach her. 

“Slowpoke!” she calls, revving up the engine. “Not much of a runner, are you?” 

“Not much of a driver, either,” he pants when he finally catches up to her. “Mind if I commandeer your chariot, my lady?” 

She scoots forward, letting him slide behind her on the seat. “You can put your hands ‘round my waist. And not an inch lower or I’ll throw you off the back while we’re driving.” 

“Wouldn’t dream of it, I’m a gentleman,” he says. “But _hurry,_ Barton’s bound to come around here any minute.” 

Worrying her lip between her teeth, Yaz glances back. “We should wait for the others…” 

_“No!”_ he yells, rather suddenly. “Barton’s armed, I saw back in the-- look, just _drive,_ alright?” 

Well, if he’s going to be like that. 

Gritting her teeth, she kicks off. The Doctor will be okay without her. She’s survived for centuries without Yaz’s help. She can manage just fine on her own.  
  


But what if…

_“Stop_ thinking about her,” O shouts as they speed along the dirt road on Barton’s ranch. “She’ll be all right, Yasmin, believe me.” 

It’s annoying, how this man seems to read her thoughts before she even articulates them. 

“We do think the same way, you know,” he says, squeezing her around the middle for support when the motorcycle flies over a pothole. 

She takes it back. It’s not annoying, it’s downright creepy. 

//

Forty-five minutes later, they’re driving through winding streets instead of idyllic countryside, and there’s still no sign of pursuit from Barton. Or, for that matter, any of Yaz’s friends. 

“Where do you reckon they went?” she calls back at O, whose shaking fingers have been marooned tightly in the folds of her dress shirt for the past quarter hour. She strongly suspects that he has a fear of high speed travel. Either that, or he’s fabric sampling for his own wardrobe. She wonders how he’d look in her getup. Probably ridiculous. 

He yells something in response to her, but she can’t really hear him because the wind is blowing back in their direction. It doesn’t matter much anyway. She plans to keep driving until they find a sizable town, then call the Doctor from there. 

As it happens, it’s only twenty more minutes before they arrive at the outskirts of San Francisco and traffic begins to pick up. 

“I hate America,” Yaz moans, wincing as a semi truck swipes past them in the left lane, blasting behind it a powerful gust of cold air that has her struggling not to swerve. The semis of Sheffield look like baby elephants next to the mammoth trucks of Southern California. _Holy mother of God,_ she thinks. How many tonnes does that thing weigh? Eight million is probably a conservative estimate. 

There’s an exit a few miles later. They’re without helmets, doing well above the speed limit on Highway 101, and she doesn’t have a death wish, so she decides to turn off there. 

By the time she finally pulls up into the car park of a convenience store, she’s pretty sure O may have torn a hole in her nice dress shirt with his anxiety vice grip. His hands, she notes with mild interest, still feel as cold as a dead man’s. She supposes it could be the wind. It’s blazingly hot otherwise. 

Yaz dismounts, stretching her aching legs and back. She’s forgotten how strenuous it is to drive these things. With a long sigh, she turns to see that O wobbles unsteadily a few paces away, folded about the waist like a slinky toy that’s been deliberately shaped into irreversible torsions by an eighteen-month-old aspiring serial killer. He pants, gripping his knees. 

“Alright there, mate?” she calls. 

“Yeah,” he gasps. “Just a Charley horse, damnit, sorry, give me a second…” 

Wow. He is really out of shape. No wonder MI6 never gave him any undercover assignments on the force. 

O’s eyes snap up to hers. “Judging me, are you?” 

“Hm,” she says, wondering how the hell he can read her so well. “I guess I am, yeah. Sorry.” 

A slow smile spreads across his face. “I won’t tell the Doctor you said that. I don’t think she’d like it much, would she, her little friends picking on each other?” 

_What the hell._

Something twists at Yaz. “Know her well, do you?” 

“Do _you?”_ Straightening, O makes his way toward her. “Remind me later… there’s something I should tell you about her.” 

Yaz starts toward the convenience store. From O’s tone, she somehow doubts that his secret is anything particularly positive about her friend. There’s something deeply unsettling about the way he’s just been staring at her. He looks quite different, actually. Unrecognizable in everything but face, as though he’s dropped some sort of pretense now that they’re away from the others. 

Oh, she realizes. _Oh._ He’s totally up to something. (Is that where his name comes from?)

Well. She has only herself to blame. It’s not as though he hasn’t been waving around about a thousand huge ass red flags since they first met. 

She doesn't worry about it too much. Whatever his ulterior motives are, they undoubtedly center the Doctor, not Yaz. And there is enough physical distance between the two of them and the timelady right now that it's not an immediate concern. 

Grimacing, she steps inside the store. The door is a heavy pane of glass, and she lets it fall back behind her. Hears it smack him in the arm with a satisfying thud. 

A bell rings above her head. 

So now the question becomes, what exactly is O hiding? And why has he chosen to let his guard down around Yaz, of all people? 

He's probably going to try to ingratiate himself to her, so that she'll help him convince the Doctor to install O as a permanent passenger on the TARDIS. Yes, that would make sense… it's only logical that he would want a spot in the fam, where he could remain close to the object of his affections (obsessions?). 

“Can you ring me up a cigarette lighter?” she asks the cashier, a small college-age woman with wispy green hair. Yaz figures they may as well have something on hand to defend themselves, and a little fire could go a long way in a pinch. 

“Sure,” comes the reply. “Can I, like, see your driver’s license? You need to be twenty-one.” 

“Hm.” Yaz glances back at O. He’s probably pushing thirty. Then again, he’d said earlier that he wasn’t much of a driver. “I’m not yet. Listen, we’re in some trouble, so if you have anything that could be used for self defence…” 

The woman frowns. “Um, not really. Just pocketknives and--” she cranes her head to look into the back room-- “artillery rifles. Do you want an AK-47? They’re, like, two thousand dollars but you don’t need an ID or anything.” 

Yaz laughs. The cashier looks puzzled. 

“... Right, you weren’t joking,” Yaz says. “Erm, yeah, actually, I’ll just have a poke around then. No AK-47s for me.” 

O follows her to the back of the store, hands in his pockets, strolling easy-as-you-please like he wasn’t acting seriously weird two minutes ago. Then again, he’s been giving off low levels of weird since he showed them all his stalker box in the Outback. Yaz isn’t exactly an expert in weirdness. Maybe it’s just the sort of personality trait that comes and goes in waves. Maybe he’ll be trending back towards lovable, harmless weirdo any minute now. 

She doesn’t know what she’s looking for at the store. There must be something here that can help them when they again face off against Barton. If worse comes to worst, she privately doubts that O will be much use in a fight. Although it’s probably best that she sticks by his side for a while longer, in case they decide to take the fight online. Vor’s playground is cyberspace, and she wouldn’t put it past Barton to hack into her cell phone to track them. 

Wait. Yaz glances around, eyes landing on the store’s security cameras. Are they connected to some sort of data cloud? Could Vor, provided a reasonable amount of time to gather geographic data, pinpoint their location and snoop through the security feeds of buildings in the area? She’s being paranoid, she knows. Then again, she’s seen aliens. 

She thinks for a moment. 

“Here,” she tells O, fumbling through her coat pockets. “Can you secure it? We need to call the Doctor, and it needs to be untraceable.” 

Pursing her lips, she hands him her cell phone. 

O takes it. He looks it over for a moment. 

“The code is 1313,” she says, but he lifts it up to show her that he’s already unlocked it. Somehow. She rolls her eyes. 

“Well, I’ll leave you to that,” she says, and begins perusing the refrigerated soda section. She’s never seen so many soft drinks in one place before. 

She chooses two Coca-Colas in slender necked glass bottles. Behind her, Yaz can hear O tapping away on her cell phone, fingers padding furiously at the screen. Briefly she doubts that the Doctor will even pick up when they call. It’s possible that Barton has already reached and apprehended them. And then… 

Well, no. She doesn’t want to think about what happens then. The Doctor always survives, doesn’t she? And Graham and Ryan, well, they’ll be okay too. They _have_ to. 

Still, Yaz kicks herself for being useless. Hasn’t the Doctor always been at her side in the face of danger? Some way to repay the favour this is, hanging out with her friend’s hot but weird spy informant, safely tucked away from the blast radius of the action. For months, she’s been frenetic, unable to sleep; she tosses and turns and storyboards films in her head where Yaz is the saviour, the white knight, and the Doctor her beautiful queen, falling over herself to give Yaz her love as a token of gratitude for the heroic rescue that the human had orchestrated singlehandedly. The plot stays more or less the same, but the setting changes every few iterations: at times the Doctor is imprisoned by Daleks, and Yaz comes rushing in to save her; or the Doctor is pleading for her life with some street robbers, and Yaz comes rushing in to save her; or the Doctor is dangling off a cliff, five hundred feet above a quarry of sharp boulders and giant hungry opossums, and Yaz comes rushing in to save her. 

Let it never be said that Yasmin Khan is not original. 

“So,” says O. She selects a bag of chips at random from a freestanding shelf, and then turns to give him her attention. 

“Yes?” 

“Do you _really_ like sloths, or has Vor gotten to your phone already?” He holds out the device to show her. 

Frowning, she tucks the sodas under her arm to free up one of her hands and then takes it. The background wallpaper, which had previously been a selfie with Ryan and the Doctor all together, is now a photo of a smiling sloth in a space suit. 

Yaz squints. All of her app icons are now tiny pictures of the same sloth. She opens up her contacts app. Wonderful. Every contact has been renamed “Astronaut Sloth”. She taps on the first one. 

  
_Astronaut Sloth,_ it reads. _Cell: 1-800-SPACE-SLOTH. Home: 1-800-SPACE-SLOTH. Work: 1-800-SPACE-SLOTH._

That’s not even a usable phone number. 

_“Why?”_ Yaz murmurs sadly, staring at her corrupted device. 

O takes it gently from her hands. Then, curling his lip, he smashes it viciously to the floor. 

“Seriously?” says Yaz. 

_“Seriously?”_ yells the cashier, running out from behind the counter at the sound of glass breaking. 

With a sigh, O turns to Yaz. “Didn't bring my own phone. Left in a hurry and I didn't think I'd need it. I don’t suppose you’ve memorized the Doctor’s number.” 

She narrows her eyes. _“Me?_ You’re the sort to do that.” 

“Excuse me,” says the cashier. “Are you guys, like, good?” 

They are not good. In fact, they are now locked in an intensely bizarre staring contest in the middle of the snack and beverage aisle. 

Yaz squints. She's winning. 

O flares his nostrils. A sure sign of defeat. 

The cashier glances between the two of them, frowning deeply. 

O clears his throat. "Are we doing that thing where we're rivals in a fierce unspoken battle of wills but the tension is secretly turning us both on and then we finally break and have passionate sex in the ashes of the shining civilization we grew up in?" 

"What?" says Yaz, breaking eye contact hastily. "No. _What?”_

"Oh look," he replies, smirking. "You lost." 

"Because _you_ won’t act normal for one second.” 

"Can’t you nerds just buy something and leave?" says the cashier. 

As much as Yaz wants to be annoyed at that, it is, admittedly, very fair. So, with a sigh, she heads to the checkout counter, grabbing a notebook and a packet of ballpoint pens along the way. They'll probably need to make a plan at some point, and she doesn't trust him to remember it without a hard copy. He seems like the sort of man who needs things written out and organized. Also, his thoughts are probably too occupied with figuring out the best new ways to sound like an anti-social libertarian history teacher who plays combo DnD & roller derby on the weekends (not in a good way). 

"Are you sure we want to pass up on those assault rifles?" he asks, strolling up behind her. Case in point. 

Yaz rolls her eyes. “You’re paying, so…” 

"I don't have two thousand dollars."

“And we're all grateful for that." She pats his arm condescendingly. 

When they finally book it out of there under the minute gaze of the increasingly irritated cashier, Yaz wonders where they’ll head next. The sun is beginning to creep lower across the horizon; this doesn’t exactly bode well for any sort of search and rescue program that needs to be engineered at a whim, so she sincerely hopes that they don’t come across any signs that the others are in trouble. Ideally, she’d like to get back to them tonight, but it’s going to be difficult. Especially since they’ve traveled a good forty miles by motorcycle this afternoon. The Doctor, presumably, covered a similar distance-- only in another direction. 

She could be anywhere in North Central California. And without a means to contact her… hm. Maybe they’d better start there. 

“Could you figure out a way to message her?” she asks, turning to her companion. “If you had a computer. Since you’re, like, the master of hacking or whatever.” 

O frowns. “I _am_ the master… of hacking. Do you know where we could find one? Haven’t been to America in a while, and I don’t expect they’ve got many internet cafes floating around any more.” 

Unscrewing her Coca-Cola, Yaz sits down on the curb to think. That’s a good question. Maybe they could find a computer shop or something. Those machines, however, tend to be demos from what she knows. And they’d be under surveillance from the shop owners. Maybe it’s still worth a shot. 

Hang on… 

“How much money do you actually have on you,” asks Yaz quickly. He’d paid for their various items with a slightly battered debit card. She thinks she’d actually be less surprised if he’d used a wad of cash. There’s no reason for an Australian recluse to carry American dollars. But somehow, he seems like the type. 

“Hm,” says O. “Probably around five hundred.” 

She jumps up. “Okay. I have an idea. Let’s get a hotel room. They’ll have a business centre we can get into if we have a room key. Those machines might not even have Vor, ‘cause hotel computers always seem to use Wing or Wicrosoft Wedge. It’s annoying.” 

“True.” His face seems to brighten. “Hey, maybe they’ll have a pool.” 

“Focus,” Yaz scolds, shaking her head. “Let’s get in there, get into contact with the Doctor, and then regroup and make plans.”

Relieved, she takes a final swig of her drink and heads back to their (ok, it’s stolen, so Barton’s) motorcycle. It feels good to have the beginnings of a plan underway. Yaz doesn’t thrive in limbo. No, not at all. 

She climbs on and once again allows O to wrap his fingers around her midsection. 

“You feel tense,” he murmurs. “Is something bothering you?” 

Yaz turns the keys in the ignition. “Yeah,” she groans. “It’s just-- they could’ve sent us threats. Or blackmail. Or, you know, programmed my phone to explode. What the hell does an _astronaut sloth_ have to do with anything?” 

//

After some searching, Yaz and O find a respectable-looking Marriott with an enormous flashing red “Vacancies” sign by the side of the street. 

“Finally,” Yaz sighs, pulling up into the parking lot. “An American company I actually recognize.” 

“Are we going to stay here overnight?” O asks. 

She ponders it for a second. It’s a bit dark outside now, though the sun hasn’t fully set. 

“We might have to,” she admits. “But I don’t like it.” 

“Then, shouldn’t we, you know, park somewhere else? It’s probably not his top priority, but Barton’s going to register this motorcycle as stolen at some point, and there will be a hunt for it. If someone recognizes it in the morning, it will lead them straight to us.” 

“Oh,” says Yaz begrudgingly. She’s a policewoman, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t she think of that? “That’s a good idea.” 

“We passed another hotel about a block away, without vacancies,” O continues. “Let’s just leave it there and we can walk back here.” 

She starts the engine again. “Fine.” A thought occurs to her. “So. Did you learn that strategy by stealing cars?” 

“Actually, I was on a police force for a while.” 

Yaz whips around in surprise. _“Really?”_

“Don’t act so surprised. I’ll tell you about it on the walk over.” 

Okay, she didn’t see that one coming, she thinks as she kicks off again. A _policeman!_ As much as she still mistrusts him, she’s beginning to feel the tiniest modicum of goodwill toward him again. He must have performed exceptionally on the force to be recruited into MI6. Maybe he’ll have some perspective to offer on the whole thing. Like why her higher-ups haven’t trusted Yaz with a serious assignment yet. (She has so many good ideas, too. Honestly, what the Sheffield force needs now is major reform, though most of her coworkers are loathe to admit it. She’d turn that place around in a heartbeat, given the chance.)

Not that she needs O’s advice. If anything, it’s the other way around. For instance, she bets she could give him a few pointers on how to make his obsessive love of the Doctor a little less obvious in decent company. 

They arrive at the other hotel. She turns off the vehicle. Her entire body aches from driving this stupid thing. It’s patently clear that it was not built for a small-framed woman.

Apparently availed of his cramp, O slides off the back with ease. Yaz, on the other hand, struggles to dismount. Her legs are so stiff that she can barely slide them over. 

“Need help?” he says. 

“Now who’s judging?” she replies, grinning despite herself. 

“Me. Here, I’ll get you--” he scoops her up and hauls her off the motorcycle-- “there.” 

Gently, he sets her down. _Ow, ow, ow._ She stretches, grimacing. 

“You could say thanks,” O tells her. 

“I could.” She considers it, shrugs. “So, thanks.” 

“My pleasure.” 

Yaz snorts. “Mm, I bet it was. So. This police force...” 

“Let’s walk,” says O, gesturing toward the sidewalk. She does. 

“We didn’t always deal with stolen cars,” he begins, glancing back to make sure she’s keeping pace with him. “We did a lot of law enforcement, but we worked with higher crimes mostly. Not really petty misdemeanours.” 

“Stealing a car is a felony,” Yaz tells him. _“Definitely_ not a petty misdemeanour.” 

O laughs. “In Sheffield. Sure. We dealt with stolen vehicles sometimes, but they were a lot higher caliber. I don’t… remember a lot of the work. The Doctor worked with me. We left the force, eventually. Ran away, more like. She was wanted.” 

The Doctor worked with O? She didn’t tell Yaz… or did she? She mentioned having known him for a long time, and it’s not as though the Doctor has disclosed much of her past to the fam. If Yaz had to give an approximation of how much personal information she knows about the Time Lady, it’s probably somewhere between _nothing_ and _fuck all._

She thinks back to the Outback, replays the moments in her mind when they were all together. Yes, O and the Doctor had worked together quite well. She supposes it makes sense, then, that they were colleagues once upon a time. 

_Don’t be angry with her, Yaz,_ she thinks. It probably just slipped her mind. They were busy yesterday, what with the fighting off glowing aliens and everything. 

She swallows. “So. Why was she wanted?” 

“Honestly,” O says, turning so that she can’t see his face, “it’s hard to understand if you haven’t, well. You had to be there, you know.” 

“Not really,” she responds with a frown. “So you ran away together? Where?” 

“Ah, yeah. We had to put her in a chameleon arch, and then we posed as humans for a while. Like I said, I don’t really remember it. I had to retrieve the memories because they--” 

_“--What?”_ Yaz grinds to a halt. 

He stops too, glancing over her with entirely too much ease. “Hm?”

With a small laugh, Yaz shakes her head. “Sorry, sorry. I just-- sorry. I thought you said-- actually, I didn’t think it. You did, right? Say that you _posed as humans?”_

“Of course.” O looks confused. 

“Ha ha,” she says. “You’re a human. Are you trying to be funny or something? Because if so, your sense of humor escapes…” She can’t finish her sentence because from the look on his face, she knows that he’s not joking. “Right.” 

Mother of God. What the hell is happening here? 

“Yasmin,” says O gently, reaching out for her hand. “She _did_ tell you about me, right? That I’m…” 

“...You’re what.” 

“A Time Lord. Like her. From Gallifrey. We grew up together.” 

No. 

_No._

She wouldn’t. Would she? 

No, she wouldn’t. But--

_What the actual hell,_ thinks Yaz. Would she? Would the Doctor really neglect to mention something of this magnitude to her and her friends? Yaz isn’t stupid; she knows that the Time Lady has been keeping them in the dark, sure, but to this extent? Doesn’t the Doctor trust them? Doesn’t she trust _Yaz?_ Yaz, who would never, never betray her, who would never lift a finger to harm her, who has never done a _damn thing_ but stay at her side, loyal always. Loyal till the very end. That she will be, she knows it. The Doctor has to know it too. A blind man could see it. 

She tells herself to be reasonable. Maybe the Doctor had her reasons. Maybe she just forgot to tell them. Maybe, maybe, maybe. 

Yaz staggers away from O, whose eyes are suddenly boring too deep into her. Are there more like him? Like the Doctor? Time Lords, scattered across the planet. The whole universe, even. 

How many others? How many has she met during her travels with the Doctor without even knowing it? 

_“You,”_ she manages hoarsely. “You…” 

He nods. Screws his face up. Reaches for the clasp of his dress shirt and begins to unbutton it, slowly. 

Then his chest is bare, shirt flapping open in the very slight ocean breeze. She can’t look at it. Can’t look at him. 

“Here,” he tells her, not unkindly. With those damned stupid cold fingers of his, he takes her hand. 

“No,” Yaz breathes without even really knowing what she’s objecting to. Certainly not his touch, because she understands, somehow, what he’s about to do, and she _needs_ to know. She allows him to lift her arm, guide her fingers toward him until they’re splayed across the centre of his chest. “O, I don’t…” 

There they are. Double hearts. _One, two, three, four._ She counts the beats. 

Keen eyes flick up to meet hers, and she flinches at his gaze. 

_One, two, three, four._

Not even the Doctor has shown her this. Time Lord equals two hearts. How does Yaz know this? From one of the Doctor’s rambling tangents. From conjecture. Actually, it doesn’t matter how. 

When she can speak, she says only, “Why?” 

His answering smile is too bright. He seems to know what she means anyway. 

“I don’t travel as much as her,” he says in answer to the unspoken parts of her question. “I spend time on Earth. Take up odd jobs and projects, like MI6. But sometimes I hop around.” 

“Fixing things?” she asks him. “Fixing what’s wrong with the universe.” 

“Of course,” he says. 

Like the Doctor, then. And… 

“You’re a telepath,” she tells him. It’s not a question. “That’s why you can read me so well.” 

“Only as long as we have physical contact. A touch telepath.” 

Yaz pulls her hand away like she’s been stung. “Is, um, is she? You know.” 

“The Doctor is a telepath too. Yes.” 

She feels sick. 

The woman she loves is a stranger. She might as well accept it now, before she learns something else about the Doctor that leaves her gutted. 

“Let’s walk,” she offers quietly. “We should, um, we should get to the hotel.” 

Without waiting for a response, she starts off, but after a few moments, she can hear his footsteps behind her. 

She’s not really sure what to do with this information. Time Lords and secrets and telepathy. It’s too much, all of it. And yet. 

_And yet._ Part of her screams not to waste this opportunity. Isn’t this what she’s wanted, for so long? Her questions about the Doctor, answered. 

“You look a little unsteady on your feet,” calls O from behind her. “You can take my hand, if you want.” 

“Why, so you can read my bloody mind?” 

But after a pause, she reaches out for it anyway. Anything to keep herself grounded. He’s still carrying the bag from the convenience store in the other, and she takes that too. Snatches it, more like. With shaking fingers, she turns over the soft plastic. Again and again. 

Her fingers creep around his wrist, searching for a pulse. 

_One, two, three, four._ Again. To remind herself that she’s not fucking dreaming. 

Another Doctor. And his stupid, _stupid_ name is O. Why is he called O? That’s not even a name, she thinks miserably. 

“It’s not O, actually,” he says unhelpfully. “That’s just the name I used at MI6. You know. Agent O. We had letters.” 

“Stop fucking doing that!” Yaz snaps at him. 

“Sorry. You’re thinking loudly.” 

She knows. She’s thinking too loudly to think. That doesn’t even make sense. Whatever. 

_Pull yourself together, Yaz._

No. She’s angry. So, so angry. 

“And don’t tell me that I shouldn’t be,” she finishes aloud, viciously, knowing that he must have heard that too. 

To her surprise, he says softly, “I wasn’t going to.” 

“Really? But the Doctor--” 

“--can be thick sometimes. Let yourself be angry. It’s good. It’s… Yasmin. You don’t deserve to be kept in the dark. You can ask me anything you want. I’m an open book.” 

It’s exactly what she wants to hear, and she wonders if he’s not just feeding back to her the things he sees in her head. A kind of manipulation. Is withholding information another kind? So that the Doctor can use Yaz and Ryan and Graham as her little… pawns, or something. 

Nothing makes sense right now. 

“What's your name?” Yaz asks him, tightening her grip on his wrist. 

She can hear the amusement in his voice when he responds, “Are you asking?” 

Irate, she stops again. They’re almost back to the Marriott now; she can see it on the next corner. 

“I am asking,” she hisses. “Obviously. Don’t play games with me. You said you’d answer my questions.” 

A slow smile spreads across his face. She drops his hand. Fucking weirdo. 

“Yasmin,” says not-O slowly. “Are you sure that you want to know? Because once you know, you can’t go back.” 

Yeah. She’s heard many a narcissistic guy say that, usually in reference to his dick, which without fail turns out to be a ten (on the scale of… seconds lasted.) Briefly she wonders if Time Lords even have dicks. Oh hell. What if the Doctor has a dick? What if she has some sort of alien genitalia? 

Why is she thinking about this? _Focus, Yaz._

“Tell me,” she says, in a tone that she hopes is suitably imperious. “Tell me your name.” 

“I will.” He sounds almost gleeful. “But just remember. You asked. You wanted to know. Remember that.” 

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Out with it, then.” 

Even in the fading light, she can tell that he’s shifted again. Changed. The same way he did, before, outside of the gas station. Some sort of facade let down. Is it even on purpose? She can’t be sure. And she gets the feeling that he doesn’t care as much about appearances, around her. 

“My name,” he says, tantalizingly slow, goading, “is the Master.” 

Then he bursts into hysterical laughter. 

Not for the first time today, Yaz thinks _what the hell?_

Egomaniac? Or is he pulling her leg? Maybe he’s getting off on this. Whatever. She doesn’t care. She just wants this stupid night to be over. 

Rolling her eyes (forcefully, so that he can see it), she begins walking again. Can they be there already? 

“Wait, Yasmin,” he calls, struggling once again to catch up. Right, he’s out of shape. _Although,_ she thinks, if he keeps laughing like a bloody maniac, he’ll probably get abs before the night is over. 

She shakes her head. “I’m not waiting. Stop fucking with me.” 

“I’m just--” he pants, jogging till he’s by her side once more, “-- I thought it was funny. That the Doctor didn’t tell you my name. She loves saying it more than anything.” 

“Congratulations,” Yaz grumbles. She hits the button on the crossing light post, waits for the little white man to appear. 

Another semi truck blasts past her face, dangerously close to the curb. Holy hell. She hates America. She hates the “Master”. She hates the Doctor. She hates this day. She hates this hotel. She hates this planet. She hates this universe. 

“You sound like a Dalek,” he tells her, sounding far too pleased, and she realizes that she’s brushing up against him. She jumps away. 

“If you do that again I swear I’ll…” she begins, swallowing. 

“You’ll what? Slap me across the face? I don’t think the Doctor would like that.” 

“Hang what she’d like,” Yaz says. The white man appears and, sighing, she steps off the curb. “I’m cross with her.” 

“I’m cross with you too,” she mutters, cutting him off before he can begin to respond. “For the record.” 

“Why?” 

“Because you’re getting on my nerves.” They’re across the street now. “You’re getting on my nerves, and I know you’re up to something.” 

The Master (Time Lords have such pretentious names, she thinks) follows her up the hill into the parking lot of the Marriott. 

Then he says, “I’m up to something? Because I’m honest with you? Because the things I tell you are things that _she_ chooses to withhold?” 

Fine. Maybe he has a point. But her anger with him isn’t righteous; it isn’t rational. It’s not supposed to be. It’s anger. Wasn’t he just telling her to embrace this feeling, to let herself experience it without safeguard? So what, it’s directed toward him too now. He can’t just change his mind. No take backs. 

She steps across the threshold of the hotel, sorely regretting that it has an automatic sliding door. She’d dearly like to smack his dumb face with a door for the second time today. 

Now, really. Where are these thoughts coming from? Yaz is _not_ a violent woman. Even all muddled in the head like she is now, she shouldn’t be thinking like this. The Master was right: the Doctor wouldn’t like it. Not at all. 

Although, if he was half as annoying while they were growing up together, the Doctor probably smacked him with a door a couple times. It would be more than justified. 

Hm.  
  


“We’d like a room,” says Yaz at the front desk. “No. two rooms.” 

“Do you think I’m made of money?” mutters the Master behind her. 

“You keep quiet,” she tells him. “One room.” 

The receptionist raises her eyebrows, then shrugs. “For how many nights, ma’am?” 

“One.” 

“Okay.” She spends a few moments fiddling with the computer. “One night will be two hundred and thirty dollars.” 

“My god,” whistles the Master, sliding his debit card across the table. 

The receptionist fake-smiles at him. It’s unconvincing. Very. “Can I get a name for the reservation?” 

“Yas--” begins Yaz, but the Master cuts her off, pulling her away from the desk. 

_“Use a made up name,”_ he whispers urgently. “An American one. If they come to the front desk looking for us, you know.” 

“A made up name?” she hisses back. “What, like yours? The Master? Stupid.” 

She’s just being contrary. Actually, she can’t believe she’s almost just done that. She’s just so used to hanging out on alien planets, where they don’t have her records, and there’s no possibility of recognition from enemies. She returns to the front desk. 

“Emma,” she tells the receptionist. It’s the most American name she can think of. “Emma… Floor.” 

“Floor?” the woman says doubtfully. “Like, the thing we’re standing on? All right. And your partner?” 

Yaz’s eyes dart around. “Oh. You mean the Ma-- Matt. Matt Floor. And, um. He’s not my partner. He’s my, um. Brother. I mean, friend. I mean, brother. Cousin.” 

“Okay. I was making a guess. Actually, ma’am, please come with me for a second,” says the receptionist, gesturing to the alcove behind the desk. 

What? The Master makes an annoyed noise behind her, and she meets his eyes, confused, as though to say _I have no idea what this is about either._

Oh, well. Hopefully the delay won’t be longer than a moment. She follows the other woman into the alcove. 

As soon as they’re out of earshot from the desk, the receptionist takes Yaz’s hands with such urgency that the convenience store bag upsets, sliding down into the crook of Yaz’s elbow. 

“Listen,” says the woman. “Um, sorry hon, I’ve seen it a couple times, you know… the accent, the lying, the fighting. Sorry. You know what I’m getting at?” 

Yaz opens her mouth, closes it. “Oh. Yes, but I promise, I’m not--” 

“Are you safe?” the receptionist murmurs, frantically. “Are you being held against your will? Because I can call the police right now. We have a room behind this that he can’t get to, where you can wait until they arrive. And, you know, I don’t mind testifying in court or whatever, if you need a witness. Sorry, I-- just say the word.” 

Oh. Yaz glances down at the woman’s name tag. _Karen,_ it reads. Unbidden, she feels a rush of gratitude well up inside of her. To hell with the timelords and their stupid games. There are good humans out there, she thinks. 

Still, she needs to get out of this. 

“Karen,” she says gently, feeling her irritation melt away. “You’re very kind. I’m actually… with the FBI.” 

Deftly, she removes her police badge from her trouser pocket, where it habitually stays in case of situations like this. 

“Undercover,” she explains, briefly flashing the badge. Hopefully Karen doesn’t get a close enough look at it to see that it’s not American, let alone FBI. “And I appreciate your kindness, but I would also appreciate your discretion. It’s a sensitive mission.” 

To her surprise, Karen bursts into tears, sweeping Yaz into a hug. 

“Sorry,” she says shakily after a few moments. “I just was scared. Of course I’ll, um, keep it a secret. Sorry, I just volunteer at an organization that works with women who’ve... and it’s just… yeah. I’m glad you’re safe.” 

Yaz pats the other woman’s hair softly. She knows that trafficking is a big problem on Earth and can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be the same on other planets. Pursing her lips, she wonders why the Doctor doesn’t do anything to stop it. Why hasn’t she brought the fam to break up any trafficking rings? Surely they must exist. Surely they must be prevalent across the universe, and a bigger issue than many of the things they’ve invested time in fixing. 

But if she were in charge of the Sheffield police force, she could crack down on it. She’s mulled over this idea before, actually, having heard a few stories of trafficked women at a conference in her home city. However, she has no idea how to actually go about changing things. She’ll have to think it over some. 

Karen, though, might know something about it. 

“Listen,” says Yaz, straightening and untangling herself from the other woman, “do you have a business card for the organization you volunteer at? I might stop by someday. I’m trying to get the, um, Bureau, to take these things more seriously.” 

Karen’s face lights up, curls bouncing as she bobs her head frantically in affirmation. “Oh, my god, really? Sorry, sorry, I’m just so glad I’ve met you, we’ve been trying to get an audience with law enforcement for _forever._ Oh, my god, this is amazing.” 

She scurries back to the reception area, rifles through her bag on the desk, and pulls out a small piece of cardstock. This she thrusts at Yaz while the Master raises his eyebrows at them from behind the counter. He’s clearly impatient. Well, too bloody bad. 

Yaz pockets the business card and turns to thank Karen once more. 

“No problem,” the woman says “And sorry for the delay… I’ve got your room key right here. Four four four, should be easy to remember. If you want to order room service in the morning, I’ll leave a note on your tab. It’ll be on the house.” 

She hands the key to Yaz, who passes it to the Master. 

“Well. It was nice to meet you,” she tells Karen, smiling sincerely. “Thank you.” 

With a final wave, Yaz starts down the hallway toward the elevators. The Master falls into pace behind her. 

“What was that all about?” he hisses once they’re a little ways away from the reception area. 

Shrugging, Yaz keeps walking. “She was making sure I was okay. Since you were kind of giving off creepy vibes. Women do that for each other, sometimes, though I don’t know if you’d understand. No offense.”

To her infinitesimal surprise, the Master says, “I know. I have actually been a woman before. A couple of times.” 

Yaz’s hand stops short of the elevator button. _“Really?_ How? You can’t just...” 

“Maybe _you_ can’t,” he says, reaching forward to call the lift himself. “Humans aren’t nearly as advanced as Time Lords. Just being honest,” he adds when she raises an eyebrow. “One life is all you get. We’re not, hm, _limited_ in that way.” 

“Like a cat,” Yaz muses as the doors slide open with a _ding._ “So when I met the Doctor, she said she was a Scotsman, half an hour before.” 

“A very handsome one.” 

“I’m wrapping my head ‘round that still. I wonder-- Karen said fourth floor, right? Unlucky.” 

“Only if you believe in those sorts of things.” 

“You don’t?” She glances over him, curiously. “Really? On Gallifrey, don’t they have anything which signifies bad luck?” 

They must. _Lucky at dice, unlucky in love,_ he told her at the party earlier. 

“The number thirteen,” says the Master, baring his teeth in a sort of private grin. “So we get twelve faces. Twelve lives. Of course, for some people, that constraint can be circumvented.” 

Yaz falls silent, considering this. How many faces does the Doctor have to her name? These reincarnations (is that even the right word for them?), do they retain all the memories from their predecessors? No, she decides. There must be some kind of consciousness loss in the process. If the Doctor’s account is to be believed (and her integrity is growing more dubious by the minute, so maybe it isn’t), then she… _changed? reincarnated?_ only a few minutes before Yaz first met her. At the time, the Doctor was certainly addled in the head. Of course, she seemed to eventually regain a general sense of identity. But if she remembers everything about her past, she certainly keeps quiet about most of it. 

Including the man in front of her. Yaz squints at him, trying to read anything in his face. It’s a strange face. It can look, in turns, like many different people. Tonight she has seen at least two, although she suspects that his camouflage capabilities don’t have a set numerical restriction. 

She thinks that he is somehow both very attractive and very unremarkable: his face nearly symmetrical, free of any defining feature or blemish, at once placid and expressive; his frame neither very muscular, nor amorphous. He’s been endowed with a generous fewer centimeters than the average man would need to stand out in a crowd. 

And yet. With a simple change of emotion, or intent, or whatever causes those little shifts in him, he transforms into someone whom Yaz might cross the street to avoid. He’s not even predatory, not really. But there’s something else… _off_ about him. Something else besides the frankly shocking revelations he’s already disclosed tonight. She’s always considered herself a good judge of character, and she doesn’t think she’s missing the mark with this one. 

The doors open. 

Yaz walks to door 444 in silence. Unlocks it. Surveys the room. 

“Right,” she says after a moment, stepping aside to let him in. “Let’s move the desk over to one of the beds, so that we can sit on either side of it and work together. We need to brainstorm, and that wall might be a good place to tape our plans to. What do you think?” 

The Master hums. “I think that we should start by trying to get a hold of the Doctor. I’ll head down to the business centre, try to get her on the line.” 

“Oh,” Yaz mutters, frowning. “Without me?” 

“I assume. You sounded pretty angry with her earlier and I doubt that’s resolved by now. Plus, it may take me a long time to contact her.” 

Hindsight is 20/20, but this is the past. Set in stone. Future Yaz, Yaz _now,_ knows enough to say that this was a gamble for him. And she wonders what would have happened if she had insisted on following him to the business centre. She suspects that she would have found it closed for the night, inaccessible. She should have known, _oh_ she should have. He wasn’t going to spoil his dramatic reveal by allowing her to contact the Doctor. He’d divulged too much by now. He needed Yaz unequivocally on his side. 

And knowing the Master now the way that she does, she understands that he doesn’t gamble. So this… _this_ is why she’ll never be sure whether he planned to take her along with him from the very start. And on the very likely assumption that he hadn’t, she doesn’t think she’ll ever know at what point he decided _hang the plan, I’ve a better one, a crueller one…_ But it didn’t turn out for him, did it? Maybe there was something to the meticulous scheming, the obsession. Whims failed the Master that day. Or maybe he just underestimated Yaz. 

No matter. It’s a case of confusing the timelines again. But she’ll keep them straight this time. She’s in the hotel now, again, with the Master and little inclination of what that means. He tells Yaz that he will go, alone, to contact the Doctor. Yaz lets him. 

There she is. She flops down on one of the beds, rummages around the plastic bag for her notebook. 

_Ohhhh, this is nice._

Now that she’s finally gotten a chance to relax a little, Yaz realizes just how exhausted she is from all this running around. Everything aches. Holy hell. She stretches out her legs, which from the feel of it are busy waging a large-scale guerilla revolution against the rest of her body. If Daleks barged into the hotel room right now, she honestly couldn’t be arsed to run. She’d probably just try to get in a speed nap before they started being all exterminate-y. 

It couldn’t hurt to slip under the covers, right? She can do her brainstorming from there. It’s not like she’ll fall asleep. It just feels

_so nice…_

//

Yaz blinks awake. 

Rats. 

“Mmmmmmmm cappuccino,” she groans, sitting up. 

Shockingly, she didn’t have one of those existential-crisis dreams where you realize your entire worldview is crumbling fast, and then you wake up, but you’ve actually just woken up into another dream which you think is real, and then you start to panic as you’re viciously attacked by giant ostriches until finally you wake up into the real world. Considering the circumstances, she’d call that a success. 

Her subconscious is definitely looking out for her tonight. 

“Yasmin?” comes a voice from across the room. 

Ugh, this nerd. 

Yaz’s head spins for a moment as she orients herself. There’s the Master, hunched over the hotel desk, scribbling frantically in what must be the cheap composition notebook they’d purchased earlier. Pages upon pages of torn paper are strewn across the floor, covered in close, spiraling black script. 

“Whoa,” she says, jumping out of bed. “Whoa, buddy. What is all this? And how long have I been out?” 

He lifts his head. “When I got back from the computer centre, you were already asleep. Looked exhausted. I didn’t want to wake you. You probably got, um, seven hours? It’s four in the morning.” 

Oh right, that’s the other important thing that may have slipped her mind. To be fair, her brain is groggy at the moment. She needs coffee. 

“Did you get hold of the Doctor?” she asks him, leaning against the edge of the desk so that she can see his face. His hair is a bit messy, in an I-woke-up-like-this sort of way. A quick glance at his own unmade bed confirms that he napped a bit too. Great, they’ll both be rested enough for today’s adventures. 

Actually, the messy hair is kind of doing it for her. Is that weird? Probably. Yes. Also, she really needs to pee. That can wait. Maybe. 

“I did manage to call her,” the Master replies, and Yaz’s heart leaps before she remembers that she’s still _very_ cross at the Doctor. “She’s with the others, and safe. They’re working on some sort of device to repel the Kassavin.” 

“Hold that thought,” says Yaz, and runs to the loo. 

  
After she’s finished, she splashes some water on her face to clear her head. The events of yesterday are a weight against her chest, constricting her diaphragm with enmity if she thinks about them too hard. So it’s going to be one of those days. 

For good measure, she brushes her teeth with the provided hotel toothbrush and paste. 

“Ok,” she says when she emerges. “Doctor. Kassavin device. Where were we?” 

“Exactly there. Supposedly the device will take a dozen or so hours to construct and charge. She’s going to pick us up tonight at eight in the TARDIS, outside of the hotel.” 

Looking back, Yaz knows now that the Master most likely never contacted the Doctor. But Present (Past?) Yaz hasn’t figured out yet the plan that she’s been unwillingly conscripted into. So this information makes her very, very irritated. 

_“”Sixteen hours?”_ she groans, slumping back onto her bed. “Sixteen _hours?_ She hasn’t told me one single important damn thing, and now she doesn’t even have the decency to pick us up on time. I mean, come on. Come _on!”_

“At least she’s coming to get us at all,” says the Master unhelpfully, reminding her why there should be a law against him opening his mouth unless it’s to spout compliments or interesting Doctor trivia that she can’t find out any other way. 

“Shut up. I’m trying to be cross with her,” she tells him. “Because I--” 

“Am in love with her?” he finishes. 

“Yes, we all know you are. By the way. Are you writing the next great New York Times bestseller over there?” 

With a hum of agreement, he reaches across the desk to scoop up all the various scribbled pages. Then he presents them to her in a haphazard heap. 

“What’s this?” Yaz squints at the handwriting. It’s a bit difficult to decipher, but then again if she can read Ryan’s, she can read anyone’s. “Roman? Romana? Your story is about female Romans? Why even make the gender distinction?” 

The Master ducks his head, smiling slightly. “That’s the name of somebody who traveled with her before. The Doctor, I mean. I wrote you a summary of her life. The important parts.” 

“Wow,” she responds. She’s not quite sure what to say. “That’s really… hang on, there’s a section called The Doctor’s Hit List?” 

“I just thought you deserve to know,” says the Master. “The general outline of who she is. The people she’s traveled with. The things she’s done. It’s not fair for her to keep you in the dark. Especially since she means so much to you.” 

Yaz meets his eyes, a little shocked. It’s… actually a sweet gesture, in the slightly weird stalkery way that she’s come to expect from him. Then again, she’d be a hypocrite if she pretended to have any scruples about him betraying the Doctor’s privacy. Because she really, _really_ wants to know this stuff. Would she kill someone for this kind of information? No. Would she rob a mid-size department store for it? Say, a Primark? Probably. 

But she doesn’t need to, because he’s just handed her a direct-access pipeline to understanding the love of her life, from an insider’s perspective. If they’d really grown up together, the Doctor and the Master, he’s bound to know all sorts of details about her that would otherwise never reach the light of day. 

Granted, she feels a teensy bit of guilt peeking at the pages. But hell, this is important stuff. If the Doctor continues to gloss over relevant information on their adventures, the fam is bound to end up in a spot of trouble at some point. Really, Yaz is lucky that the Master turned out to be an inoffensive weirdo. What if he’d been evil? Would the Doctor even care that her closedness put Yaz in danger? 

“So,” begins Yaz, studying the Master and his messy hair. She can work with this. She can actually work with this. And moreover, the biography has clearly done its magic, because she finds herself _wanting_ to. 

“So,” he echoes. 

Yaz leaps up and makes her way over to him. “Tell me one thing.” 

“Sure.” 

“You and the Doctor have known each other for a long time. Did you two ever--” she can’t finish the rest of the sentence aloud without cringing at herself, so she lays a hand across his cheek instead. Thinks it. Hopes he catches her drift. 

“Obviously,” he says, laughing. “What, did you think we wouldn’t have?” 

A funny warmth curls around her stomach. She feels a little foolish, but in a strangely euphoric way. Oh, well. She may as well go for it. 

  
“In that case,” she tells him quietly. “I have an idea about how to pass these next sixteen hours _and_ get back at her at the same time.” 

The Master smirks, meeting her eyes. “Well, so do I. And my idea is better. But go on, then, kiss me.” 

Ugh. 

“What?” exclaims Yaz, feigning surprise because she’s not going to let him be obnoxious about _this._ “Shut up, that wasn’t what I was thinking!” 

“Actually, it was. Moreover, you allowed me to hear the thought. Something about using me to get closer to the Doctor...” He glances at her hand, which is still touching his face.

_Fine._ Yaz withdraws it and reminds herself that slapping people is assault, even if they are annoying know-it-all telepaths. 

“You!” she huffs. 

“Relax, I’d actually rank it in the top most arousing fantasies that a human has ever had about me,” replies the Master. “But like I said, you’ll want to try my idea first.” 

Fine, she’ll bite. “Which is?” 

He looks concerningly smug. 

“You,” he begins, quirking an eyebrow. “Me. A dying civilization. By which I mean _Gallifrey._ If it makes you happy, we can even have sex in the Panopticon. I’ll let you call me ‘Doctor’ the whole time, although I draw the line at wearing a blonde wig and--” 

“What?” Yaz interrupts, squinting. Surely he must be bluffing. Or an idiot. “You want to take me to Gallifrey?” 

“First date. Beats the convenience store,” he says with a shrug. 

“But how would we even get there?” 

She sorely doubts that the Doctor will just up and take them on holiday to Gallifrey. You know, the place that she’s resolutely refused to discuss for as long as Yaz has known her. Yaz stares at the Master. Are his pupils different sizes? Did he bump his head in the night? 

“TARDIS,” he says evenly. “Time vortex. Zoom zoom. It’s simple, really.” 

“You want to borrow the TARDIS? I don’t think...” 

“No. I have my own.” 

His _own?_

Now wait just a damn minute. 

This whole day that Yaz and the Master spent running around like bereft little feral cats, they could’ve been enjoying the luxury of a teleportation/time travel deluxe combo sentient air-conditioned resort spaceship? 

Time Lords are so bloody useless. 

“Is it on Earth?” she asks, crossing her arms and leveling him with her best intimidating glare. 

“Well,” he responds, “yes, but--” 

“Go.” 

“Hm?”

_“Go,”_ Yaz repeats. “Get your TARDIS. Time travel back here so I don’t have to wait. We can hop over to Gallifrey and be back in time for the Doctor to pick us up.” 

“But--” 

“Go.” 

“I’m not running errands for you,” he says. “That’s demeaning.” 

“So what, we get a lift in sixteen hours and somehow find our way to your ship? You’re just going to make me wait, indefinitely? That sounds like something the Doctor would do. And I could’ve sworn you had this whole vendetta about proving to me that you’re different from her,” Yaz says, and now it’s her turn to be smug. 

These sorts of things can go both ways; that is to say, Yaz can manipulate the Master, too. It’s one thing that she honestly didn’t expect, and it won’t always work. But it does now.

(Of course, it had to work this time. He needs her to come with him, to Gallifrey, and he can’t force her to accompany him to his TARDIS. He’s back on the plans now, probably schemed this one up last night. Probably didn’t expect her to play fetch with him. She learns, much later, that his TARDIS was parked in Australia. So she actually made him travel for several days just to retrieve it. Which is why he’s so deeply offended by her demand. Not that Yaz knows any of that, yet. 

  
Still. Feels good.)

Straightening, the Master glares at her. “Fine. But don’t expect it to become a habit.” 

“We’ll see,” says Present Yaz, glancing pointedly toward the door. “See you soon.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, but he does leave a few minutes later. 

While he’s gone, Yaz busies herself with tidying the stack of papers. The Doctor’s unofficial biography. It’s probably worth a great deal of money, in some parts of the universe. Maybe she’s supposed to burn it after she finishes reading it. To preserve privacy and all that. 

She remembers Karen from last night and picks up the phone, orders her free room service. Coffee and biscuits. Studies the first page of the Master’s scribbles, which doesn’t seem to bear any chronological relevancy to the rest of the document. 

Twenty minutes later, there’s still no sign of his return. _Not_ cool. She’s been patient long enough. Of course, the Doctor’s scheduled to pick her up this afternoon, so she’s not too concerned about a contingency plan in case he bails. But she so dearly wants to see Gallifrey. 

Wait a minute. Was that wardrobe there two seconds ago? 

Yaz leaps up, eyeing it warily. Sure enough, the door swings open and there’s the Time Lord’s slightly haggard face peering out at her. She can’t help but grin. It’s nice when people keep their promises. Unusual. And nice. 

Something smacks her slightly on the shoulder. Yaz picks it up. It’s a tiny bag of snacks. 

“Peanuts,” he says. “From the flight. Thought you might want them. I had to take a human airplane. It was unpleasant.” 

“How sad for you.”

Gathering up the rest of her things, Yaz makes her way over to the wardrobe TARDIS. 

“Ready?” He extends a hand. She takes it. He pulls her inside. 

Yaz bites back a grin. “To Gallifrey?” 

“To Gallifrey,” he echoes. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um guys let's just pretend that O showed his creepy stalker box to Yaz instead of Graham in Spyfall.
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading! I do a lot of technical writing professionally, so I wanted to try my hand at a story :) It's kind of freeing not having to be super concise, and I may have gone a little wild with the word count... haha. Most of this fic is already written and will be posted soon.
> 
> I'm having so much fun with this and I hope you guys like it. Please leave a comment if you enjoyed!!


	2. look what your mind's imagination can do (making shit true)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Master takes Yaz to Gallifrey for some good old-fashioned snooping on the Doctor, but someone else has other plans for their trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Attempt 2 of trying to get this to actually post, lol. Anyway we're about to get some action (in both senses of the word)
> 
> Also guys idk if this is a trigger for anyone but there will be an IV mentioned in this chapter. 
> 
> p.s. to improve reading experience, please imagine that everyone in this fic is absolutely jacked xx

Rumour around the universe has it that Yasmin Khan loves three things most: herself, the Doctor, and long range Death Star-esque planet destroying superweapons. It’s not even an especially arbitrary list; the three items share a surprising amount of commonalities. 

Of course, few people know that. But enough do. Enough also know that it’s in the universe’s best interest to spread the word about this phenomenon. The trouble with word-of-mouth, though, is that the picture often becomes distorted by the time it disseminates to the masses. So a few centuries down the line, people are saying with confidence that the weapon doesn’t exist, never did. It’s just another of those stupid Gallifreyan myths, like regeneration or to-go coffee mugs which don’t spill your drink. 

Unfortunately, this is only true from a certain perspective. A crucial perspective. That perspective is not Yaz’s. And a hell of a lot of the universe’s problems are her fault, but not this one. 

It’s not even the Master’s fault either, nor the Doctor’s, though most things can generally be pinned on the both of them in some way. It’s a fluke. A paradox created by parthenogenesis. It shouldn’t be possible, but it happens. 

And Yaz stumbles into it by genuine accident. 

It begins with a trip to Gallifrey. That part _is_ the Master’s doing, she supposes, though she’s loathe to admit it, because he’d be all too happy to take credit for this particular incident. 

Oh, well. She should probably straighten out this chronology before she gets too mixed up again. This sort of thing has been happening more and more, regrettably. Some people have told her that it will improve. Some have said that it will worsen. Not that anybody actually knows. She’s the first frontier for this little experiment.

One of the advantages of Yaz’s new condition is that she can access any memory from her first lifespan and experience it as though she is living it once again. Now, where did she leave off? Ah, right. She selects the hotel in California, the Master’s TARDIS. That’s where she was. She needed a little break because things were about to get annoyingly, retroactively, meta. But she’s good to continue now. So she does. 

There’s Yaz, and there’s the Master, and there’s Yaz watching the Master from her own perspective in the past. He’s leaning over the console of his TARDIS, fiddling with something. Present Yaz is surprised enough to find out that his house in the Outback was actually a secret space ship. A tastelessly decorated one at that. 

“You’ve been in the kitchen already. Go make yourself a cuppa, it’ll be a while till I get this idiotic ship to cooperate with me,” muses the Master. He’s facing away from her, wearing a fresh outfit. A purple dress shirt and trousers. Weird combo, but then again, that dinner jacket was beginning to get a bit stained. She should probably change too, come to think of it. She wonders if his TARDIS will also provide her a wardrobe tailored to her specifications, like the Doctor’s does. 

Look at her, she’s growing spoiled. 

“What’s wrong with the ship?” she asks him even as she begins gravitating toward the kitchen. 

“Doesn’t want to go where we’re going,” he says. “Pathetic piece of junk.” 

It’s a bit jarring to hear him speak this way of his TARDIS, especially since the Doctor is so obsessed with hers. She’s like… the alien equivalent of a car guy. If car guys fantasized about having private time with their cars. (What? Yaz has totally seen the way the Doctor looks at that ship.) 

“Well,” she tells him. “Let me know when we’ve landed. Do you have any spare clothes I can borrow?”

“About that,” the Master lifts his head, turns to face her. “You’ll stick out like a sore thumb in human clothes. There are some red robes in the wardrobe in my room-- at the end of the hall, on the left. And for Rassilon’s sake, let down your hair.” 

Yaz touches her ponytail self-consciously and resists the urge to make a smartass comment about Rapunzel. 

The TARDIS doesn’t seem ready to move any time soon, so she hops in the shower before changing. Technically it ought to be his shower, but it looks totally unused. Ew, does he seriously not clean himself? There’s not even any soap here. No soap rings on the ceramic ledges. 

Maybe he just… prefers to take baths. That must be it. It’s not like he smells especially bad. Right? Yaz sniffs her own armpit to make sure that her nose is working. Yikes, she really needs to find that soap. 

On the bright side, she definitely doesn’t have COVID. 

When she’s all well and clean, she goes searching for those robes. He was right. They’re very… _red._ Nothing particular against red. It’s just not her colour. 

She feels ridiculous sliding on the damned things and even more ridiculous viewing the result in the mirror. These are. So. _So_ ugly. Explains the Doctor’s fashion sense if she grew up around them. 

_You really want to go to Gallifrey,_ Yaz reminds herself. _You really want to see where the Doctor grew up._

Man, the things people do for love. 

“I look like somebody’s wacky aunt,” Yaz grumbles, stumbling back into the console (living?) room. Yes, stumbling, because these dumb robes are also far too long for her. 

The Master looks up, bursts into laughter. 

“You look like somebody’s wacky president,” he tells her finally. Gleefully. 

“Why aren’t _you_ wearing these too?” she retorts. “I see too much purple, not enough hideously bright red. Come on, I hope yours are worse.” 

“Nah.” He chuckles. "It actually won't matter how we’re dressed. I just want to see you in those things.” 

“Hey!” Yaz snaps, affronted. 

“Say cheese!” he tells her, gesturing enthusiastically above his head to the living room security camera, which is conveniently pointed _right_ at her. “Can’t wait to show this footage to the Doctor.” 

She rolls her eyes, more exasperated than truly annoyed. “Forget it, I’m changing.” 

“You won’t want to,” says the Master. “We just landed.” 

Indeed, the TARDIS gives the barest of startles before settling down. Clearly its resident Time Lord is a considerably smoother pilot than Yaz’s friend. 

Here they are, then. It seems so… simple? All these months Yaz has spent theorizing about this planet, she could’ve just _come._ Between waking up this morning and arriving here, fewer than two hours have elapsed. Surely the Doctor is capable of bringing the fam along for such a trip too, even though her piloting accuracy leaves some room to be desired. 

So why hasn’t she? It’s not like they haven’t asked. 

“Come on,” urges the Master, flinging open the TARDIS doors. 

Yaz inhales, hikes up her robes, and marches forward. (Time Lords can time travel, so really, how hard could it possibly be for them to invent a belt so that they won’t trip over their own skirts?) In another show of gentlemanliness, which is beginning to feel increasingly out of character for the Master, he helps her descend the stone steps on the TARDIS’s threshold. 

So this is Gallifrey. They’re in a hallway. As far as hallways go, it’s a nice one. As far as introductions to mysterious planets go, she’d hoped for a bit more. Maybe a room with a view. 

  
She turns to see that the TARDIS has taken the shape of a white marble facade to blend in with the rest of the hall. Does his ship camouflage itself or something? Splaying her hands across the stone, she draws another deep breath. 

The air here is fine, she decides. Similar to Earth’s, except a bit thicker. More humid, maybe. Heady and heavy. A bit. 

“Where are we?” she asks the Master. 

“Inside the Capitol,” he tells her. “Try something. Jump.” 

Eyeing him warily, she hops into the air-- and promptly falls flat onto her face. 

“What the…” 

“It’s the gravity,” he explains. “Slightly weaker here than Earth. Barely enough to make a difference in any way that matters, but if you’re not expecting it, it’ll throw you off. Good joke, eh?” 

Grinning, he extends a hand to help her up. She doesn’t take it, glaring at him. 

“Fine,” he says with a shrug. “Come this way, I’ll show you around one of the libraries.” 

Yaz pulls herself to her feet and follows him down the hallway. Time Lords must not be avid readers, because when they reach the library, it’s totally deserted. 

She’s not sure what sort of library she was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t a dimly lit, low ceilinged, narrow passageway lined with tiny silver boxes. This place is grim, to say the least. 

Is there an internal speaker system in here somewhere? This room desperately needs some elevator music, maybe a lo-fi hip hop beat. It’s disturbingly silent. She’s not even sure she wants to set foot inside. 

But she does, because he does. She’s following him, after all, and she’s certain that he wouldn’t lead her into danger intentionally.

Okay, she’s like seventy-five percent certain. And those, Yaz decides resolutely, are still good odds, so she approaches one of the walls. Hovers her hand over a box. 

“What are these?” 

“Hard copies,” says the Master absently. Yaz peers at him. He’s not paying her any mind; instead, his gaze is fixed on something on the opposite wall. She follows his stare. He’s just looking at another box. Cool. 

“Hard copies of what?” she asks him. 

“Archives.”

“Wow.” Yaz shakes her head, wandering a little further away. “Thank you for that very specific and helpful answer.”

He doesn’t reply and she’s not even sure that he’s heard her. He’s looking for something, she realizes. Probably something exceedingly boring. Where are the people on this planet? She wants to meet the people. Or at least get a proper tour. Either way, she’s _not_ going to just spend the whole time staring at the back of this nerd’s head. 

Glancing back to make sure that he’s not watching her, Yaz cautiously lays a hand on one of the boxes. It doesn’t sprout teeth and bite her, which is a good sign. She lifts the lid, reaches inside. 

It contains a tiny scroll of paper which Yaz removes. In the near-darkness, she can’t make out any of the writing on it. Maybe she ought to go retrieve a flashlight from the Master’s TARDIS. 

Yaz clears her throat. 

“I’m cold,” she tells him, which isn’t even a lie. “I’m going to go get a, mm, _coat_. Be back soon.” 

The Master hums. “Don’t wander. I’ve got something to show you. It should be in here somewhere.” 

“Right.” 

Gathering up her robes so as to avoid kissing the floor for a second time today, Yaz starts back toward the hallway. She feels only a little bad about bringing the scrap of paper with her. Part of her suspects that it’s something important and probably shouldn’t be moved. Then again, the Master didn’t tell her _not_ to touch any of the boxes. 

Yaz steps back into the hallway, blinking at the adjustment in light. It’s still completely quiet, save for her footfalls, which are even lighter than she’s used to. Her boots don’t echo the way she’d expect them to on marble. This planet is so strange. Everything about it seems just _slightly_ off. 

Sighing, she ducks away from view of the library door. She’ll go and get that flashlight in a moment. First, though, she retrieves the scroll. 

To her disappointment, it’s covered in an illegible swirling circular script. Yaz turns it over. It’s the same on both sides. Hang on, shouldn’t the TARDIS be able to translate written language? The Doctor’s does. Perhaps the Master didn’t enable that particular feature on his ship. 

Yaz is just about to head over to the TARDIS, when, bizarrely, a song begins to play from somewhere in her general vicinity. Even more bizarrely, she recognizes it, though she can’t remember the name. So twenty-first century R&B is popular on other planets? She hopes that someone is cutting Victoria Monet an intergalactic check right now. 

“Where is that music coming from?” she asks, peering back through the doorway at the Master. He’s moved further into the depths of the library passageway, still studying the boxes intently. Oh, shit. Yaz hopes that he’s not searching for the scroll she borrowed. That would be a bit awkward to explain. 

“What music?” says the Master inattentively. 

The song grows louder. Yaz holds her breath, listening. It’s definitely not coming from his direction. 

He can’t hear that? Maybe it’s on a frequency that only humans can pick up. Or maybe Gallifreyan buildings psychically determine the type of entertainment you’d most enjoy and livestream it into your head. After all, wasn’t she just thinking about wanting some music? 

There’s a third option, she decides. Perhaps it’s some sort of message for Yaz. In that case, she should probably find the source of the music. 

Is that a stupid idea? It could easily be a trap. Then again, she’s never shied away from a little danger. Especially when it entails an investigation. 

Making up her mind, Yaz starts back down the hallway. There’s really no need to give the Master any notice about this. If she’s quick, she privately doubts that he will even notice that she’s gone. 

It’s quite a good song, Yaz thinks as she wanders the corridor. Time Lords may have questionable taste in most things, but she approves of their music of choice. If Ryan were here, he’d probably be busting some moves to make her laugh. 

The hallway splits into three tributaries. Yaz selects the rightmost one, because the song seems to emanate from somewhere in that general direction. This passage is far narrower than the others, and the floor changes from an unbroken slab of marble to a pattern of much smaller green tiles. The walls, too, are a sort of bleak emerald colour. They’re poorly insulated, Yaz thinks. It’s freezing in here. 

Shivering, she continues to follow the music. Eventually, the passage tapers even further, until she’s boxed in closely on all sides. The walls become rougher, the emerald craggier. Then just as the second verse begins to play, Yaz turns a sharp corner and stumbles into a small room. 

_What the…_

Against the far wall stands a figure, cloaked in a great swath of white fabric. Yaz can’t make out its face. However, it’s singing along in an itchingly familiar voice. But that’s not possible. Right?

“Give me all of your emotions,” croons the figure. “Lan---”

“Excuse me,” interrupts Yaz, a bolt of real fear trickling down into her heart. It is. It can’t be. But it _is._

“Yasmin Khan,” comes the eerily calm reply. The figure’s voice is devoid of a certain… manic charm that Yaz is used to associating with it. But she’d know it anywhere. “I’ve been waiting for you.” 

“I can see that,” she says, swallowing. “Um. Can you turn around?” 

It does. 

Yaz is right. It’s the… 

“Doctor?” she whispers hoarsely. 

This doesn’t make any sense. How could the Doctor know that Yaz was here? She was supposed to pick her up, back in California. Unless this is a future version of the Doctor. But why… 

Guilt settles heavy and low in her stomach. Yaz shouldn’t be here. She knows that. There’s really no way around it: she agreed to the Master’s proposition because she wanted to snoop on her friend. But that’s only because--

“Why didn’t you tell me?” demands Yaz, suddenly irate as the emotions of yesterday come flooding back to her. “That _he’s_ a Time Lord, like you. That you can read minds. That you grew up here, with him. That there are other Time Lords wandering the universe?” 

The Doctor just laughs. Her hood is blindingly white, even in the gloom, and when she removes it, Yaz can see that her hair is very long. Though somewhat frazzled, it spills down across her shoulders, past her waist. 

Yaz crosses her arms. “Well?” 

“I’m not a Time Lord,” the Doctor replies, sounding amused. “I just look like one. And you look grumpy. Lighten up.” 

_What?_ Well, she’s got some nerve, Yaz thinks. Why is she even here? Never mind that it’s her home. From the little information Yaz has gathered on the Doctor, she suspects that her friend does not just holiday on Gallifrey for fun. 

Come to think of it, what is this place? Yaz gives the room another once-over. It’s totally unremarkable. Just a dim, unfurnished space, lined with stone. Like a man-made cave. 

“Doctor,” says Yaz, digging her nails into her palm worriedly. “What the hell is going on here?” 

Her answering smile is gleamingly bright. “I’ve got a gift for you,” says the Doctor. “How are you liking Gallifrey so far?” 

Yaz shakes her head in disbelief. “So. You’re still not going to answer any of my questions. And, for the record, I don’t. It’s creepy. Does anyone even live here?” 

“I do.” 

“Okay.” Yaz chews at her lip. “Doctor. I’m going to ask you again, and _please_ tell me this time. What is happening?” 

“I’m not the Doctor,” says the Doctor _(huh?)._ “But you do know me by that name, don’t you? A little bird told me you were visiting Gallifrey. Thought I’d come say hi. I missed you in the future. Wish you’d call more.” 

“You’re still not telling me anything.” 

Shaking her head, the Doctor reaches for Yaz’s hand. Takes it. Squeezes it. “Actually, I’m telling you _everything._ You’re just not listening. Did you like the song?” 

“I guess?” 

“I chose it because it’s your favorite. In the future,” says the Doctor, nodding sagely. “Sorry. I get them mixed up sometimes, the past and the future. The present is the hardest. Yasmin.” 

“...Yes?” 

Then the other woman is staring at Yaz intently, blonde fringe framing her eyes. Her expression is somehow more heated than Yaz remembers it ever being. This is… weird. Ordinarily, she would be overjoyed to have the love of her life so laser-focused on her, but something about this situation remains unsettling. Why is the Doctor here? Why has she traveled all the way from the future to meet Yaz on Gallifrey, only to issue her some sort of creepily cryptic message? 

Is this the Master’s doing? Did he organize this, as a way for the Doctor to reconcile with Yaz or something? He must know. The timing is awfully suspicious. 

Counterpoint, though: the Doctor is holding Yaz’s hand. Does it really matter how she got here, or that Yaz is technically angry with her, or that this place looks like a horror movie grotto? Time travel is odd. There are bound to be some odd happenings attached to it. It’s part of the deal, really. 

Some things are universal, though. Like the feeling that humans get when their crushes hold their hands. So although she’s mightily confused, Yaz isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

Then the Doctor leans forward and presses her lips to Yaz’s. 

_What?_

She’s so startled that she jumps back, nearly tripping over her robes again. 

“Um. What are you doing?” Yaz whispers hoarsely. Is she dreaming? This must be a dream. 

Frowning, the Doctor says, “I thought you would like that.” 

“Oh, no no,” Yaz stammers. “I did. I did, I did, but--” 

_But why are you all over me now, when you’ve been studiously ignoring my advances since day one? But why does it feel as though you’re doing this to shut me up? But why is your hair like eight hundred meters long all of a sudden? But--_ oh, fuck it. 

Trembling, Yaz pulls the Doctor back to her and returns the kiss with vigour. This may be the only chance she gets to do this, after all. And Yaz is only human. 

It’s a perfect kiss. Somehow, the Doctor seems to know exactly what Yaz has fantasized about for months. She wraps slender fingers around Yaz’s waist, pulls her forward so that their chests are flush with each other. 

She tastes like something delicious. Like tropical fruit. Maybe cherimoya. And her hands are delightfully warm, in stark contrast with the chill that pervades the room. 

Why are her hands warm? The Master’s weren’t, yesterday. So maybe low body temperature isn’t a defining Gallifreyan quality. He probably has circulation issues or something. Yaz files that away and returns her attention to the kiss. 

The Doctor breaks away, planting her lips firmly at the corner of Yaz’s jaw. _Oh, fuck._ This is… yeah. Yaz lets out a pleased groan. 

“Back up, sweetheart,” murmurs the Doctor, guiding the human’s body gently to press back against the wall. Yaz complies, heart racing. Are they actually going to do this? Here, in this gloomy deserted building, on a strange planet? She’s not picky, but, you know. 

Then the Doctor presses a heated open mouthed kiss to Yaz’s neck, and she’s suddenly forgotten all of the reasons why this makes no sense. Every molecule of her body smoulders for the Doctor. It always has, even before she met her. All her life, she’s waited for something like _this._ A love that sets her on fire. 

Yaz is shaking, cold and hot at the same time, aching everywhere. What is happening? She doesn’t understand. Time is syrupy, viscous, enveloping her in the manner of a dream. It doesn’t matter. She wants it. Wants _her,_ more than anything. 

“Please,” she tells the Doctor, voice halfway between a command and a sob. 

Long blonde hair brushes against her clavicle as the Doctor nuzzles her neck. Yaz shivers, clutching at her. 

“Yasmin,” the other woman says gently between kisses. “I’m on your side. Only me. You have to believe me.” 

Yaz swallows, already fluttering heart clenching painfully in her chest. This, she can understand. These words. They’re a promise. Except the Doctor doesn’t keep her promises. 

Does she? 

“I believe you,” Yaz croaks, even though she doesn’t. She feels like crying. Why does she feel like crying? 

“You don’t believe me,” whispers the Doctor. She licks a stripe up Yaz’s throat, then straightens to look her in the eyes again. “But you will. I’m leaving you with something. To protect you.”

She’s strangely intense today, so unlike the Time Lady that Yaz knows. She wonders what happens to her in the future. 

Yaz hauls her in for another kiss, letting her hands drift all across the front of Doctor’s cloak. She can’t find any fastenings. No matter. The Doctor is already guiding Yaz’s robes down her shoulders, down her stomach, until they pool around her waist. 

Gooseflesh creeps its way rapidly across Yaz’s bare torso, until she can feel her nipples begin to harden beneath her bra. It’s so, so cold. 

“You’re so good,” says the Doctor. “Always wanting to help everyone. Let me help you, now.” 

“Okay,” stutters Yaz, even though she doesn’t really understand what the other woman means. “Okay. Okay. You can-- help me.” 

The Doctor reaches around and unhooks Yaz’s bra. The stone against her back is so cold that she can hardly stand it. But she sees lightning when the Doctor presses her tongue to Yaz’s breast. 

She tries to empty her mind as the Doctor swirls her tongue, because the more Yaz thinks about this, the less she knows. Some things just happen, she supposes. And beautiful things, things like _this,_ don’t need rhyme or reason to be beautiful. 

Yaz gasps as the Doctor teases the other nipple with her tongue, arching away from the wall. There’s nothing to grasp on its surface for balance, so she smooths her fingers into the Doctor’s hair instead. Its texture is so unfamiliar that she pauses for a moment. Frazzled, indeed. It feels the way curls do when they’re wrestling against an old keratin treatment. Like every strand has been recently stood on end by a particularly potent strike of lightning. 

“Your hair,” whispers Yaz. 

The Doctor kisses her stomach tenderly. “I designed it,” she says. “It’s more rugged. Don’t you like it?” 

To be honest, none of Yaz’s fantasies thus far have included a Doctor who looks like this. Not that she’s unattractive. Just… unexpected. Come to think of it, none of Yaz’s fantasies have included a scenario where the Time Lady was pleasuring _her._ The Doctor has always struck her as a selfish lover.

Yet here they are. This Doctor-- she’s so, so different from the woman that Yaz knows. Isn’t that what she’s just said? _I’m not the Doctor. But you know me by that name._ Perhaps Time Lords change their names across their lifetimes. Many humans do, that Yaz knows. And actually, she finds that she doesn’t really care if this is “her” Doctor, since “her” Doctor doesn’t exist. Moreover, she would be unattainable if she did. Yaz will take what she can get. 

“I like it. You’re perfect,” she tells the Doctor, because the Doctor _is_ perfect, in spite of all the ways that she isn’t. Another contradiction in a hell of a contradictory day. 

In one motion, the Doctor stands and hitches up Yaz’s robes, pressing a sweet kiss to the corner of her mouth. 

“May I?” she asks, skirting her fingers around the waistband of Yaz’s panties. 

“God, yes,” Yaz gasps. Closing her eyes, she lets her head fall back against the wall. She’s so fucking wet already. She’ll probably finish embarrassingly fast. 

But the touch she’s expecting doesn’t come. Instead, she feels the Doctor’s forehead pressing against her own, breath mingling with Yaz’s. Heart catching in her chest, Yaz waits for a few moments. The Doctor doesn’t move. And then… and then. 

_“Holy shit!”_ hisses Yaz as the world falls out from underneath her and her vision goes dark.

//

For a moment, there’s nothing. 

Then she’s gliding among stars, looking out into an empty expanse of universe. She feels weightless. Sad. She misses it. She regrets what she’s done. 

_What does she miss? What does she regret?_

Yaz. Yaz. She’s Yasmin Khan. No, she’s not. She’s a princess now, and a beautiful knight is building her a castle. A deep calm descends upon her. She will be safe here. No army can penetrate the castle’s defenses. 

Princess Yasmin walks through the royal gardens, letting the sunshine beat down on her face. Except that it’s a cold sun, and instead of warming her, it sucks away her body heat. But she does not shiver, because she is a princess. She wants for nothing. She has achieved absolute peace. Nothing can shake her from this state. 

She continues walking. She walks for one thousand years, until she reaches the edge of the planet, and she doesn’t stop even then. Princess Yasmin walks off the edge of the planet, which isn’t really a planet at all. Then she is in space once more, falling among the nebulas and galaxies. As she falls, she looks for a jewel. But she can’t find it. She’s lost it, dropped it into the sea like Rose from Titanic. 

She falls. She falls past the Earth, past the sun, past the Milky Way, past the universe. Then there’s nothing. 

Yaz falls into her body. 

Her eyes shoot open. 

There’s the Doctor a few feet away, studying her. She’s against the wall still, in a tiny stone room on Gallifrey. 

_What the fuck?_

Cursing, Yaz pulls her robes back up. She doesn’t bother with her bra, which is strewn, forlorn, across the floor.

“What did you do?” she says, panicked. The chill in the room is a mere flesh memory now, for she feels inexplicably warm all over. 

The Doctor smiles seriously. “I gave you a piece of me. It’s my gift to you.” 

“What?” Yaz clenches her fingers into her robes. “I don’t understand.” 

Was that a dream? A part of her thinks that it was not, that she somehow lived one thousand years in one second. But how? Her thoughts are muddled. 

“I forgot. You humans,” the Doctor is saying, shaking her head. “Always needing something physical to latch on to. Here you go.” 

She thrusts something at Yaz, and shaking, Yaz takes it. It’s a heart-shaped silver locket, hung on a silver chain. Instinctually, she knows that she must wear it, so she slides it around her neck. The locket rests just below her clavicle. The metal surface must be cold, but she can’t feel it. 

Wait. 

Why did she do that? That was stupid. Yaz moves to remove the necklace, finds that she has no real desire to, and drops her hand back at her side. 

“Open it when you need it,” the Doctor says. “You’ll know when that is. Yasmin. There are three questions that you want to know the answer to, and you should. Ask the first.”

There are, in fact, many questions that Yaz could ask right now, chief being _what the hell is happening?,_ so she’s not really sure what the Doctor means. Except, she actually is, isn’t she? 

The words rise unbidden to Yaz’s lips, although she knows immediately that they are the right ones. “Where is everyone? On Gallifrey. Where?” 

“Dead,” says the Doctor simply, and Yaz feels her stomach turn in horror. 

Surely not. Surely that can’t be the reason that the halls of the Capitol are so silent. For heaven’s sake. Is she an idiot? She’d thought all the Gallifreyans were on holiday or something. 

So, what killed them, some sort of war? Or a plague? How long have they been dead? The Master can't know, surely, or he'd never have brought her here. Is he finding out now, as he searches for Yaz, uncovering empty hallway after empty hallway, wondering where his brothers and sisters have gone? Yaz tastes salt. 

“Who?” she chokes out. “Who killed the Time Lords?” 

The Doctor stares at her. “The Time Lords have been extinguished many times. They always find a way to return, but their luck is running out now. Would you like to know who destroys Gallifrey for good?” 

Yaz nods mutely, unable to find the words.

“I can tell you that,” says the Doctor. “So can the Master. Ask him too. We’ll both give you answers, but one of us will be lying.” 

So he knows? The Master knows about this. He brought her to his planet, knowing that it would be deserted, knowing that his people were gone. 

  
What a jackass. 

“Tell me,” Yaz whispers, balling her hand into a fist. Maybe she was wrong to trust the Master. But he’s been so kind to her. So thoughtful. He _wouldn’t…_ or perhaps he would. She knows very little about him, after all, despite his open book act. “Tell me, Doctor. Tell me who destroys Gallifrey.” 

The Doctor chuckles softly. “I destroy Gallifrey.” 

_No._

_Her?_ Her? The _Doctor?_ But that’s impossible. 

Yaz lets out a muted cry, sinking to her knees.

This can’t be happening. 

She’s a fool. All those lies. All those obfuscations. She should have known. 

Unless. 

“You’re the one who lies,” croaks Yaz. “Please tell me you’re the one who lies.” 

The Doctor shakes her head. “You’ll have to hear his answer and decide for yourself.” 

It’s not her. It’s not the Doctor, she can feel it. Does the Doctor think Yaz is stupid? Why would she kiss her and then confess to such a heinous crime? This must be some sort of test. 

Or perhaps it is true. Some terrible part of Yaz wonders if it even matters, if even _this_ could make her stop loving the Doctor. She thinks that maybe it couldn’t. Wishes it would. 

“You have one more question,” says the Doctor gently. 

“I’m good.” 

She’s had enough. Honestly. Why couldn't she have had her imaginary thousand year’s reprieve _after_ learning this information? She’d quite like to be Princess Yaz again, falling among the cold suns and galaxies of a universe that no longer makes sense. Something clicks in her head, and time seems to speed up even more. What is happening?

The Time Lady smiles at Yaz. “Maybe. But you need to ask.” 

Yaz _really_ doesn’t think that’s true. Yet she can feel the question locked in her throat once more, struggling to escape. It’s a stupid question. It doesn’t matter anymore. And she’s compelled to ask it, anyway, somehow knows that the answer will be important. 

“Why,” says the human. “Why did you stop earlier? I thought we were about to… you know.” 

Then, impossibly, the Doctor lets her cloak fall open-- the same cloak which, Yaz noted earlier, had no opening. Beneath it are… rags. Just rags. Scraps of stained clothing, brown and white, which hang haphazardly from her frame in messy layers. 

Yaz’s mouth hangs open of its own accord. 

“You thought I was about to fuck you,” says the Doctor. “But I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. In your life, it only ever happens the other way around: Yasmin Khan, pleasing the Doctor. And you see, Yaz, I can’t make something out of nothing. Because I’m not really here. I’m created from your memories.” 

“Wha-what?” Yaz blinks. “But you’re real. I felt you.” 

The Doctor smiles. “Yes, you did. You felt me, and I’m not real. I’m in your head.” 

Yaz blinks again, and the Doctor is gone.

So that’s that. Yasmin Khan, alone in a stone room. She lays down and dreams and does not move for many hours more. 

//

_“So what do you think you can bring to the force?” asks the man with the ivory shirt, sipping leisurely from an uncovered styrofoam cup._

_Eighteen-year-old Yaz hasn’t seen anything yet, but she knows already what she wants. She eyes the portraits of the retired chiefs of police which line the wall behind the man’s head. She will be up there one day._

_“Love,” she says. “Passion. For helping people. For… making things right. Respect for the uniform and everything it stands for. You can trust me to serve my community.”_

  
  


//

Despite the claims of some intersectional galactic species advocates, there are very few experiences that all living creatures across the universe share in common. Yaz doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to endure one of them: waking up on a strange couch with a blinding headache after almost having sex in a dark room with someone who _really_ looks like that hot friend you fancy, but there’s just no way to tell if it was actually them because you’ve got the worst hangover-brain and they’re busy committing a crime in Guam. 

It’s slightly less common, however, for the individual in question to wake up hooked to a makeshift IV drip, and even less common for that IV drip to have been hung by the Master, destroyer of a thousand galaxies, creator of climate change, kicker of puppies, etc. etc. In fact, this particular sequence of events has only happened twenty-seven unique times in the history of the universe. If you also adjust the parameters to account for species and sex, then it’s a perfectly true statement to say that Yasmin Khan is the only human female in the universe to ever wake up attached to fluids administered by the Master after almost shagging her hot friend, who is now too busy committing tax evasion in Guam to answer any of Yaz’s pressing questions. 

Sadly, Yaz will find out the particulars of these statistics too late to add them to her resumé. For now, all she knows is that she just woke up on the ugliest sofa she’s ever seen, feeling like death itself. 

“Hello?” she calls out wearily. The room is obnoxiously bright, and she vaguely remembers having passed it while wandering through the Master’s TARDIS earlier today. Then she glances down. Stares at the plastic cannula in her left hand. Wonders if she’s sick or something. 

Wait a minute. It’s coming back to her now. The song, the room, the Doctor, the necklace… 

Where the bloody hell is the necklace? 

Slightly panicked, Yaz gropes through the folds of her robes, searching for it. Maybe it just became unclasped. It could have fallen off, or… 

It’s not there. 

She needs to find it. Right now. 

Stumbling to her feet, Yaz does a cursory once-over of the room. There’s nothing shiny or silver in eyeshot except the streaks in her swaying vision. Her head feels like it’s been decapitated from her shoulders, tossed into a women’s MMA ring, and then crushed slowly with a hydraulic press over the course of fifty-five years. 

She takes a step forward and is unceremoniously tugged back by the plastic tubing attached to her arm. Squinting, Yaz tries to find the IV bag. If she can just get it off, she thinks. 

There it is, hanging from a shelf above the sofa. Next to a potted plant and… is that one of the boxes which earlier lined the shelves of the Gallifreyan library? 

The Master totally stole that! It probably has some information about the Doctor that he wants to add to his stalker file collection. Honestly, she knew she shouldn’t have trusted him. 

_No, you didn’t,_ she tells herself. _Just like you didn’t have any idea about the Doctor. Provided, of course, that she wasn’t lying to you earlier. Which is a whole other mess all on its own._

Is she going mad? 

Her head really hurts. 

Okay, Yaz decides. She has a plan. She’ll get this IV bag unhooked and then try to find her way out of the Master’s TARDIS. Maybe once she’s on Gallifrey, she can find a… _phone,_ or something, to call the Doctor. She’ll be able to help Yaz. 

A _phone?_ What is she thinking?

There’s a bit of shuffling behind the door of the room and she stills. That must be him, the Master. 

Wait. He probably has some use for whatever is in that box, right? Yaz gets the wild idea to take it hostage, in case he’s the one who took her necklace. They can trade. No harm, no foul. And then he can take her home. (That’s all she really wants, in this moment. Just to go home. She can sort out things there.)

Standing on her tiptoes, Yaz seizes the box from the shelf. It’s the same size as the other-- that is to say, quite small. And inside… 

Oh. Yaz finds, to her surprise, that she can actually read the scroll it contains. Perhaps the circular drawings on the previous one were just that: drawings. So Gallifreyans _do_ write in a language translatable by the TARDIS. 

She can’t lie, she kind of dug the circular pattern. It would make a good tattoo. 

Yaz blinks a few times to banish the spots in her vision, then reads: 

**Memo Re: Galaxy Eater**

**Device blueprints will be finalized shortly. Please ready the smithy for device construction in approx. 22 years. Roppen’s termination will precede manufacture. Roppen has requested firing squad as cause of death.**

**Applications for device manufacture are open to floor 8 laboratory employees. Only employees on regeneration 11 or 12 are encouraged to apply. Please specify desired method of post-manufacture termination in application. Remember that the cost of death will fall on the employee’s family! For this reason, employees are encouraged to select blaster fire as the most inexpensive option.**

**Thank you and have a good decade! :)**

**Official Presidential Memo** _._

 _  
_ Again, Yaz blinks, not processing anything on the page. Galaxy Eater? What the hell is this thing talking about? She flips it upside down and tries reading it that way. 

It doesn’t help. 

“You won’t be able to understand that,” says a quiet voice behind her, and Yaz jumps. Shoves the paper behind her back and whirls around. 

“Understand what?” 

The Master rolls his eyes. “I literally just saw you holding it. Might as well give it back to me, though. It’s not written in a language that the TARDIS can translate to English.” 

Well. Either he’s an idiot, or he doesn’t give his ship enough credit. Probably a bit of both. Yaz decides not to mention that she can read the stupid thing just fine. It just makes no sense. 

Of course, there’s another, more pressing matter at hand. 

Glaring at him, she snaps, “where’s my locket?” 

“What locket?” he asks. 

To his credit, the Master can play dumb quite well. However, Yaz isn’t falling for it this time. She _knows_ she was in that room. _Knows_ that she met the Doctor. It wasn’t a dream; it couldn’t have been. 

But where is that damn locket? 

With a snarl, she lunges for him, only to startle in her tracks when the plastic tubing yanks quite forcefully on her arm. 

The Master glances down at it, then back at her. 

“Yasmin,” he says slowly. “You’re very sick. I found you in a hallway a little ways away from the TARDIS, unconscious. You had a fever of forty point five degrees. I think you’re imagining things.” 

“I’m not imagining _anything,”_ she tells him. “You’re lying. I was in a room. Not a hallway. And I had a locket. Where’s my locket?”

“I’m not _lying,”_ the Master growls, sounding frustrated. Yaz huffs, sits back down on the sofa. She tells herself that it’s to loosen the tugging from the IV, but really her head is beginning to spin again. 

He’s lying. He must be. 

Still… a part of Yaz wonders if he’s not right. Maybe she really _is_ ill. (But she felt fine this morning. How long has she been out?) Or maybe her body is dealing poorly with the change in gravity (But she never had any sort of reaction during her trip to the moon with the Doctor, and Gallifrey’s gravity is far stronger than the moon’s.) 

And then, of course, there’s the locket. Something about it seems so infinitesimally important that Yaz _knows_ it has to be real. She must find it. So much hangs in the balance. 

Except, she reasons, it doesn’t. Where is that coming from, anyway? Is that what the Doctor put in Yaz’s head earlier, an inexplicable obsession with a piece of jewelry? 

But then again, the Doctor was also in Yaz’s head, manufactured by her brain. Apparently. A feverish hallucination, right? It would make perfect sense. 

Sighing, she runs her hands through her hair. So she’s ill. Well, she should have known that a hot make-out sesh with the love of her life was too good to be true. She sinks back into the sofa, lamenting her condition. Her head continues to pound, and the stupid red robe continues to itch like hell. She’s pretty sure that her breasts have rug burn. 

_Damn,_ Yaz thinks. Her brain certainly went to some odd places while she was unconscious. Genocide? Really? She needs to stop watching those World War II documentaries to fall asleep. And it would seem that some part of her subconscious still… 

Hold on. 

Breasts. _Breasts._ Yaz’s breasts are chafing from the robe. She clutches at them.

She’s not wearing a bra. 

“I knew it!” she crows accusatorily, leaping to her feet. Startled, the Master takes a step back. “I knew it! You were lying. I heard music. I followed it into a mysterious room. I saw the Doctor--” 

“--You _what?--”_

“--She took off my bra. And then, and _then,_ she gave me the locket.” Yaz stares him down. “So where. Is. It.” 

“I don’t know what--” 

“YES YOU DO!” she bellows. “Tell me, or else I’ll… I’ll… eat your stupid memo scroll!” 

For a moment, total silence falls over the room. They’re locked in another sort of staredown, each resolutely refusing to break eye contact. Yaz clenches her right hand into a fist. She will hit him. Hang the ethics and morals and reasons. She will. She swears it. 

Then, suddenly, the Master sighs and turns away. “Got me,” he mutters in a tired voice. “Well done. But Yaz. You _are_ sick.” 

“No, you are,” she retorts. “You’re a very sick man. Bringing me to your planet when all your people were dead. Yeah, I know about that. And I _know_ you must know who killed them.” 

Frowning, the Master reaches into his pocket and retrieves the silver necklace. Yaz twitches at the sight of it. He can’t touch it, she thinks wildly. He’s not allowed. He doesn’t know what it is. He can never find out what it does. 

Not that it _does_ anything. It’s just a necklace. A gaudy piece of silver, emblazoned with patterns that don’t have any meaning. 

Yaz’s head pounds. 

“This isn't what you think it is,” says the Master. “I don’t know where you found it. But clearly your human brain was getting fried from wearing it. The locket is real, yes. The rest of it is your imagination.” 

“It’s not,” she insists. “I met the Doctor. I swear.” 

“No.” He shakes his head. “I have a time lock on the Citadel. No life forms can enter until I remove it. And I did find you in a hallway, Yasmin. You did have a fever. Face it, you’re ill. Delusional. Go back to sleep.” 

A flash of blinding anger surges through Yaz. “Give it to me first,” she hisses, shaking. 

It’s foreign, the anger. She doesn’t recognize it, but she welcomes it. It will help her now. Sobbing and pleading will get her nowhere with the Master. He doesn’t seem the sort to be moved by tears. 

“Yasmin. It’s a _chameleon arch,”_ he says, slowly, as though he's speaking to a hard of hearing two-year-old instead of a (sort of) grown woman. “Do you know what that means?” 

She glances at it again, nearly shudders with how badly she wants it. With a shaky breath, her eyes lock onto his. “Tell me.” 

“I’ve used one before,” he says. “They look like this. Silver lockets, with Gallifreyan writing on them. They contain the consciousness of a Time Lord who has been housed in a… different casing.” 

The thought of it is so absurd that Yaz nearly laughs with relief. He doesn’t know, after all. What a fool he is. Time Lords. Always think they know everything, don’t they.

Yaz gives herself a pinch, reminding herself that _she_ doesn’t know any better than he does. Where the hell are these intrusive thoughts coming from?  
  


_Ignore them,_ a voice in her head seems to say. _It’s just instincts. You’ve the right ones. Get the locket._

Fine. She thinks she’ll go mad if she doesn’t, anyway. 

“It’s not a ‘chameleon’,” she says, emphasizing the last word mockingly. “It’s just a necklace. And I want it. So give it to me.” 

The Master narrows his brows. “You’re being naïve. You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you were to open this thing, who _knows_ what hell would break loose. Do you want that?” 

“I do,” she says boldly, straightening her back. “Go on. Open it. It’s _just_ a necklace.” 

“I’m not opening it.” 

“Open it.” 

“No.” 

_“Open it.”_

“No. Yasmin.”

“I _said,”_ she begins, plastering a false smile across her face. “Open that damn necklace or I swear I’ll--” 

“FINE!” he roars, seizing the locket in his left hand. “I’ll do it, even though it will probably kill you, _Not. That. I. Care._ In fact, I’ll be _glad_ to get rid of you, because traveling with a measly little human is stupidly exhausting, especially a no-good sneak like--” 

He wrenches the locket open. 

_One. Two. Three._

Holding her breath, Yaz waits for something to happen. 

_Four. Five. Six._

Scowling, the Master lifts the artifact to his eye level. Studies it for a long, long time. Finally, when he’s apparently satisfied, he hurls it in her direction. 

“You were right,” he mutters. “It’s just a stupid necklace.” 

Yaz catches it, heart singing. Reunited at last, she thinks. Instantly, her headache seems to melt away, and a comfortable warmth settles over her body. Her necklace. Her protector. She will never allow it out of her sight again. 

Fondly, Yaz traces the symbol burnished across the silver. It's a single word, engraved over and over. _One._ She pulls it open. There’s nothing inside, just smooth, warm, metal. 

Inhaling deeply, she hangs it around her neck, then remembers something. Her eyes snap up to the Master’s. 

“The Doctor,” she tells him. “She was real, and I can prove it. You can read my mind, right? You can see her.” 

The Master chuckles softly, shaking his head. It’s plain that he doesn’t believe a word she’s saying. But she’s going to make him believe it. And then she’s going to make him take her home. 

Wrapping the IV tubing around her wrist so that it will not tug at her cannula, she stands. Blessedly, her head is steady once more. Yaz reaches for his hand and lifts it to her temple. 

As clearly as she can, she tries to recall the events of earlier. The music. The fighting. The kissing-- she hastily omits that bit. He doesn’t need to see that. 

She summons these memories to the front of her mind. 

  
“Look,” she demands. “Look. She was there.” 

A moment passes in silence, and she thinks that she’s getting through to him. 

Startled, the Master withdraws his hand. Yaz frowns at him. He blinks. The expression on his face is totally bewildered. 

Then he turns on his heel and races out of the room. 

“Wait!” calls Yaz. “Where are you going?” 

  
But he’s disappeared. _Bollocks._

Should she go after him? Perhaps he saw the stone room, the emerald hallway. Perhaps he recognizes them. Even now, he might be looking for the Doctor among the winding corridors of the Capitol. Yaz wonders if he’ll find her. 

Another thing. How long was Yaz unconscious? Because if it was more than a few hours, she must surely be hydrated enough by now to remove the IV. Then again, if she still has a fever, she supposes that might be dangerous. She knows nearly nothing about medicine. 

Yaz touches the back of her right hand to her own forehead. It feels normal. Although, she reminds herself, you can’t really feel a fever on yourself. 

Right. She may as well give it a go. The Master has already proven himself to be a decently competent nursemaid, so she’s not too worried about becoming gravely ill. He can administer first aid or something. 

Wherever he is. 

Readying herself, Yaz unwraps the gauze which holds in place the cannula. She’s very glad he didn’t use tape. 

She’s been to the hospital before, of course. Once when she broke her arm at eight years old and once when she had to get her appendix out at fifteen. So she knows how to remove an IV: put pressure on it with one hand and slide it out with the other. Well, she has only one workable hand right now. She’ll do her best. 

With a grimace, Yaz yanks the thing away, then uses the end of her robe to wrap her hand as tightly as she can. _Ow._ Dammit, she can tell why professionals do it differently. 

Yaz grips the ends of the robe tightly as she sets off through the TARDIS. She must look rather silly, she thinks, with her skirts hiked up and wrapped around her hand. 

After a few minutes of searching, it becomes clear that if he is in the TARDIS, he’s doing an exceptionally good job of hiding. The Master’s ship seems to be much smaller than the Doctor’s. Yaz counts about eight rooms in total. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the rest of them are secret, camouflaged in some way. But she wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about finding them.

She decides to have a look outside of the TARDIS. He can’t have gone far. 

But he’s nowhere in eyeshot. 

Uneasily, Yaz wanders down the main corridor, pops her head into the Gallifreyan library. She’s definitely not a fan of this place anymore. 

She rounds a corner-- and runs headlong into the Master. 

There he is, she thinks triumphantly, before he’s shoving her into the wall. 

“Hey!” Yaz squeaks, wrestling away from him. “What the bloody hell are you doing?” 

“Shut up,” he tells her urgently. “Do you know the Cybermen?” 

Should she? _Cyber-men?_ Sounds unfamiliar. She shows him these thoughts, only to realize that he’s still waiting expectantly for a verbal answer. That’s strange. He had no qualms about reading her mind in California. Maybe he doesn’t trust the information in there anymore. 

“No…” she says. He’s got her pinned by the shoulders and she definitely doesn’t appreciate that. But she’ll allow it as long as he doesn’t try to take her locket again. Wait. Is that what he’s trying to do, steal it away from her? Beginning to panic, she clutches it and twists so that he won’t be able to get to it so easily. 

The Master looks exasperated. “Forget the bloody necklace for a moment. The Cybermen are like… life support systems. They can upgrade the body once it has been irreparably damaged. Then upload the mind. Remove _pain.”_

“Sounds nice,” she tells him quickly, still grasping the locket. “So?”  
  


“So,” continues the Master. She can see the barest hint of a smile begin to ghost across his face. “Do you know why I brought you to Gallifrey?” 

“So you could slam me into walls, steal my jewelry, and act like a right prick?” 

He rolls his eyes, but does release her. “No. I needed to assess the damage. What you said earlier. About my people being dead. How did you find out?” 

“I already told you,” she grumbles. “The Doctor said so. Said that _she_ did it, destroyed Gallifrey. Supposedly.” 

Which, now that she’s thinking about it more, doesn’t add up in the slightest. What possible motivation could the Doctor have had to ravage her own planet? Then again, what possible motivation could she have had to lie about doing so? Maybe she just lies for the hell of it. She _does_ have a history. Again, Yaz reminds herself that she doesn’t know her friend half so well as she thinks she does.

The Master looks positively gleeful now. Every time he smiles like that, something bad happens, Yaz thinks warily. 

“Yasmin,” says the Master. “I was able to track down something that will help us. It’s called the _Cyberium.”_

“Help us do what?” 

She’s not sure she’s going to like the answer. But then, to her surprise, he says: 

“Save them. Save the Time Lords.” 

“What?” Yaz is not following here. 

“The Cybermen,” declares the Master, grinning with excitement, “can bring them all back. New bodies, but the same minds. No, not the same. _Upgraded._ I’m going to help them. And you’re going to help me.” 

_Her?_ What could Yaz possibly do to help him? She’s never even seen a “Cyber-man”. Also, she was just about to ask him to take her home. 

He's improvising now, she'll realize later. Still clinging to the shattered vestige of his stupid evil plan, which anticipated a variety of extraneous variables but not imaginary, surprisingly on the mark, Doctor and Yaz sexy time/twenty questions. Interesting. It's one of the only times she'll ever see the Master truly panic, and she doesn't even know it yet because he's such a damn good pretender. 

Now, though, the Yaz of Yaz's memories-- that is to say, Present Yaz-- thinks he's just being a bit random. And though she wants to return to the Doctor on Earth, she thinks that maybe she should wait. Just till she hears the rest of his explanation. Just to be sure. 

“Now hold on,” she tells him. “I thought you brought me here so that I could learn about the Doctor.” 

“I did,” says the Master. “And you are. That memo you stole from me?” 

“You stole it first.” 

“Whatever.” He reaches into his trouser pockets and retrieves several more scraps of paper. “I’m assuming that you didn’t yet get to the part in my story about the Time War. No matter. That memo, along with these, detail everything you need to know about the Doctor. Not that you can read any of them.” 

“Yes I can,” Yaz tells him. 

“Don’t be an idiot. These document the construction of a powerful weapon. The likes of which have never…"

Yaz zones out. He's going down another one of those tangents which makes him sound like a psycho aquarium janitor who tries to explain the detailed inner mechanics of hydrogen bombs to children on class trips. He should try to tone that whole vibe down. He’s so attractive, too. If he would just stop acting creepy once in a while, he could be in a glossy magazine ad for Dior watches. Mmm, wearing a white t-shirt. She'd buy that magazine. Especially since printed pictures don't lead you into questionable places, like Marriott or the gravesite of an entire species. 

Yaz compiles a list in her head of all the reasons she shouldn't trust him. 

  1. On Earth, he literally made a career out of stalking people, chief being Yaz's best friend and/or possible imaginary girlfriend. 



  1. She's only known him for three days, give or take the amount of time she spent unconscious with a fever. 



  1. He thought that Genocide Central would be a good place for a first date (really? There aren't even any restaurants around here, dude), and now he wants her to help him fix his planet when they really should be getting back to Earth to stop the Actual Alien Invasion going on there.



  1. He stole her necklace! Who even does that? 



On the other hand, 

  1. Yaz's best friend and/or possible imaginary girlfriend may or may not actually be responsible for the genocide in the first place, so



  1. out of all the Time Lords Yaz knows, he's probably the safest and least murderous option until she figures out what the hell is going on. At least he actually answers her questions!



  1. Provided that the Doctor was lying about destroying her own planet, she'd probably be pretty impressed if Yaz brought all the Gallifreyans back to life as high-tech "Cyber-men". (Plus, you know, Yaz would save a lot of lives in the process. Win win.) 



  1. Okay, she doesn't have anything for this one. He still stole her necklace and that was a douchey thing to do. 



That reminds her, she's supposed to ask him about Gallifrey, though she’s not sure how helpful his answer will be in narrowing down the alleged liar unless he says something obviously false like “Big Bird burned the planet”. Or maybe this whole stupid Sphynx puzzle is just some strange sleight-of-hand created by Yaz’s unconscious brain. She still hasn’t ruled out the possibility that it was all a hallucination, like the Doctor claimed. It would be telling, though, wouldn’t it, that even the Doctor in Yaz’s head speaks in riddles and obfuscations. Then again, Yaz is putting a lot of stock into her subconscious. Like giving it credit for conjuring solid objects. She’s not an X-Men. 

“... the ability to raze whole galaxies to the ground,” the Master is saying. “With a molten core attached to a sentient interface which can access the mind of anyone who intends--” 

Yaz clears her throat. “Can we cut out all that technical stuff? Answer a question for me.” 

“Oh,” he responds, looking slightly hurt. “Nobody’s ever interrupted one of my monologues before.” 

_That explains a lot,_ Yaz thinks. Outwardly, she says “Sorry,” as sincerely as she can muster. She’s buttering him up. Flattery seems to work on this dude. 

“Hm,” he mutters in a voice that indicates he’d dearly like to finish his uncomfortably intense rant about the powers of this super weapon. Right, she’ll just nip that in the bud then. 

“Master,” Yaz says, staring him directly in the eyes. That’s a technique they learned on the police force; makes it harder for suspects to lie. “Master. I’ll help you with your ‘Cyber-man’ project if you answer me this. Who destroyed Gallifrey?” 

She braces herself for the answer. He’ll give her a name. Then perhaps she can research that person, determine whether they could have possibly been responsible. Surely Yaz will need to stay on Gallifrey a little longer if she's going to help him with the Cyber thing. It will give her the perfect cover to sneak off and rifle through the libraries a bit more.

_“I destroy Gallifrey,”_ the Doctor said earlier. But that remains to be seen. For surely there’s no way the Doctor could have been the culprit. With each passing moment, Yaz doubts it more. The Doctor, who’s such a humanitarian, who’s so _good!_ The best person she’s ever met. 

Yes, Yaz will get two names: the Doctor and somebody else. One of them will be a lie. This is good. Narrows it down. Gives Yaz something to focus on, to investigate. And when she proves that the Doctor did not destroy her planet, Yaz will work with the Master to bring the Gallifreyans back as technological miracles. Everyone will live happily ever after. 

Yaz holds her breath. 

“If you’d listened to my explanation, you’d see where this is going,” the Master tells her a bit sourly. “The weapon. Whatever you want to call it. It’s all right there, in the records. Hard to miss. It has only been used once, during the Time War, when somebody stole it. Want to hazard a guess who?” 

“Why don’t you tell me?” 

“Oh, come on, Yasmin Khan. Use your brain,” he tells her. “The war was never-ending. Brutally devastating for both sides. One Time Lord stole the weapon and vowed to use it to wipe out everyone: the Time Lords, the Gallifreyans, the Daleks.

So, my dear, the person who destroys Gallifrey,” continues the Master with a curl of his lip, _“is the Doctor.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All will be revealed... eventually. Thank you so much for reading! Please let me know what you think so far :)


End file.
